The Long Form

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The Long Form

Kate Briggs

It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.

‘An exquisite study of care and attention, The Long Form explores the mysterious, often unbridgeable gulf between daily life and narrative fiction like nothing else…. Written in crystalline prose as tender as it is precise, as clean as it is challenging, this is the most thorough investigation of what the novel, as form, can really do; it asks who or what it is for, how it may or may not interact with our various realities, how it holds time and space and might better equip us to make sense of the world beyond the page. Kate Briggs has created a quietly radical masterpiece.’
— Maddie Mortimer, Goldsmiths Prize judge

‘[S]ometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect…. [M]akes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.’
— Jo Hamya, Guardian

‘The Long Form is gripping, with all the satisfactions of more traditional narratives, albeit in unprecedented places…. Reading Briggs, I felt the novel, as a genre, lift its head and look around the room, with all the effort, focus, and luminous curiosity of a newborn, seeing in a way it hadn’t seen before.’
— Audrey Wollen, New Yorker

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.

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Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent British book publisher based in Deptford, London, specialising in literary fiction and long-form essays in both translation and English-language originals. It focuses on ambitious, imaginative, and innovative writing by little-known and neglected authors. Fitzcarraldo Editions currently publishes twenty-two titles a year. Four of Fitzcarraldo's authors have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Annie Ernaux (2022) and Jon Fosse (2023).