The Longcut

Serial rights targeting New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper’s, n+1, Lit Hub Print and digital publicity targeting NPR, The Atlantic, Bookforum, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Lit Hub, Electric Literature Multi-city national tour targeting independent bookstores; promotion at festivals Review copies sent targeting all major print and digital literary media outlets, reviewers, and booksellers; additional copies available upon request Promotion on publisher’s website and social media; promotion via e-newsletters to booksellers, reviewers

From Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall, a debut novel in the first person about the place of art and the artist in the world.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.