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The Colloquy of Little Book

Joan Didion once explained the famous calculated brevity of her style by telling The Paris Review that “I always aim for a reading in one sitting” (2006, 77). Didion was clearly echoing Edgar Allan Poe’s dictum in “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he argued that “there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art— the limit of a single sitting.” “It appears evident,” Poe claimed, that the proper length for any literary work of art is “about one hundred lines,” and in a kind of mathematical proof of his own poem “The Raven,” Poe set out to describe the precise poetical effect produced in the duration of that precise one hundred (Poe, 546). The question of length— particularly the relation of length to affect and reception— appears to be on the academic hive mind lately. More to the point: it appears “the short form” is the dominant critical academic and fictional mode du jour. Minimalism is having a moment. Contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill, and Sarah Manguso are acclaimed for their aphoristic, distilled prose; their use of fragments; and attention to white space— a strategic style of reticence reminiscent of modernist fiction and the postmodern “flash cuts” (Didion’s term) that is trending in a current return to writers like Renata Adler, Natalia Ginzburg, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Fleur Jaggy, with books typically “clocking in at a sharp 101 pages” (Phillips), or nearly so. A plenary at the 2020 American Comparative Literature Association on “The Short Form” promises to scrutinize a series of short forms currently on trend, including “the tweet, the bumper sticker, and