The Long Form [Paperback]

From the award-winning author of the book-length essay This Little Art, a debut novel that reaches back to the start of the novel tradition and outward to the complexities of contemporary life.

Kate Brigg’s debut novel—the follow-up to her acclaimed This Little Art—is the story of a young mother, Helen, awake with her baby. Together they are moving through a morning routine that is in one sense entirely ordinary—resting, feeding, pacing. Yet in the closeness of their rented flat, such everyday acts take on epic scope, thoughts and objects made newly alive in the light of their shared attention. Then the rhythm of their morning is interrupted: a delivery person arrives with a used copy of Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, which Helen has ordered online. She begins to read, and attention shifts. As their day unfolds, the intimate space Helen shares with her baby becomes entwined with Fielding’s novel, with other books and ideas, and with questions about class and privilege, housing and caregiving, and the support structures that underlie durational forms of codependency, both social and artistic.“[A]n utterly resplendent, luminous exploration of fiction’s possibilities. . . . let there be trumpets, heralding Briggs and the possibilities of this long form.” —Jennifer Kabat, 4Columns

“I finished The Long Form and started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.” —Moyra Davey, The Paris Review

“Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form—with its recul%