The Long Form

(Paperback)

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Description

Helen and her young baby, Rose, are awake. It is first thing on a new morning. They move, they rest, they communicate; Rose feeds. Thoughts and associations travel far beyond the remit of the front room in their rented flat, which they pace, and which, alive with them, continually becomes new. Their delicate balance is interrupted by the delivery of A History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - a novel which describes itself, semi-seriously, as inventing the novel-form for the very first time. As the morning progresses, Helen starts reading it. Indirectly, and each in their own distinct ways, Helen and Rose start thinking about it: its claims to newness, its length, its essayistic digressions, its invitation to imagine old and new forms of life, writing, and experience.

The Long Form, Windham Campbell Prize-winner Kate Briggs' long-awaited debut fiction, unmakes and remakes the novel to meditate on very real social issues, from housing, to care-taking, to friendship, laying bare the settings and support structures that make durational forms of co-existence first thinkable, then possible. At once acrobatic and deeply attentive, The Long Form insists on the creativity inherent in everyday life, showing how the acts of social composition (living arrangements) are continuous with the acts of artistic composition (page arrangements). It is a brilliant novel of profound contrasts and productive co-dependencies, in which the small details of a day speak to the largest questions of form, responsibility, continuation and love.

Reviews

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'Kate Briggs's This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes's own work - the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.'

- Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't

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'I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs' truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that's as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I've read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little, at all.'

- Lauren Groff, author of Matrix

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'Brilliant.'

- The Windham Campbell Prize

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Author Bio

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes at the College de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. The Long Form, her debut novel, follows This Little Art, a genre-bending essay on translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.