Third Place Books welcomes author, former Stranger contributor, and Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall for a discussion of her debut novel, The Longcut. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance.
Copies of The Longcut will be available for purchase at the store. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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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.
"Stuffed to the gills with strong convictions. . . less manifestoes about what art should be than inkblot tests."
—The New York Times Book Review
"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, author of Saint Sebastian's Abyss
“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, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire
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.
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