The Longcut

by Emily Hall

Overview

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn’t know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she’ll know it when she sees it. 

Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a “completed” column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. 

An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628974164
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Series:	American Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	761 KB

About the Author

Emily Hall has been a contributor to Artforum since 2003; her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Stranger, and the zine RedHeaded StepChild. The Longcut, her first novel, was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize. She lives in New York, where she edits exhibition catalogues at The Museum of Modern Art.

Editorial Reviews

Shortlisted for the Novel Prize

"I remember how Knut Hamsun’s Hunger scared & excited me when I was young & now, later on, Emily Hall’s The Longcut has produced its own inimitable effect. I think of a mayor I read about who advocated digging a hole so big there’s no alternative to filling it. Emily Hall’s digging (for art) is bedraggled and ecstatic (“I was a lunatic for miles”). It makes its mark and I am helplessly subsumed in it still. Her Longcut is like an Artist’s Way for bad kids." —Eileen Myles

"The anxieties of the artist are vigorously analyzed to the point of near insanity in Emily Hall's schizophrenic debut. An artist walks through a city to an appointment, asking the simple and unanswerable question: what is my work? Hilarious and claustrophobic, angular and digressive, The Longcut questions the role of capitalism in creation, while proving it's nearly impossible to make art if one thinks about it too much." —Mark Haber

“Bold and irreverent: like a DYMO machine gone nuts on a Mondrian print, The Longcut is a hilariously inventive take on what it means to be making “work” in the self-conscious world of art-making while also, at the very same time, trying get through the many material distractions of an office job. A striking debut!” —Jen Craig 

From the Publisher

2022-04-13
A young artist seeks the subject of her work within the teeming ontology of the city.

The unnamed narrator of this debut novel is an artist. This facet of her identity, the fact that she is an artist, is indisputable to her in spite of the fact that her art—its subject, its premise, and its form—is, as of yet, inscrutable both to others and to herself. The question of what exactly is her work is one that consumes her, occupying her near total attention as she walks the streets of her city, slots answers into the “completed” column at her absurdist job, eats unsatisfying, overpriced sandwiches, or moves items from place to place inside her tiny studio, aka apartment. It seems possible that the permutations of the question “what is my work?” could occupy the narrator’s thoughts more or less endlessly, especially in a time when, in the narrator’s words, it is acceptable “to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner”; however, a deadline of sorts has been superimposed on this question because the artist has a meeting. This meeting, set up by a well-known artist friend of the narrator’s whose artistic endeavor consists of “setting up situations,” is with a gallerist whose attention may just help the narrator place her work in the public eye, if only she knew what that work was. In recursive prose—mirroring the art-world use of deliberately abstracted language with an expert’s ear—the narrator circles the question of her identity, her interiority, her agency, and her originality, even as she circles the location of her long-anticipated meeting through familiar streets that have become defamiliarized by the intensity of her observation. Surreal, heady, and elliptical, this book reads like a Seinfeld episode if it were co-written by Beckett and Derrida. Unfortunately, much of the wit, trenchant observation, and insight are occluded by the density of the language. This clearly intentional, even integral, stylistic choice is at the heart of the novel’s attempt to elevate even the most utterly banal elements of modern life to the level of “the work,” and yet it will prove a barrier to all but the most dedicated of readers.

A book that toys with brilliance but falters in the bog of its own telling.

Kirkus Reviews