A Moment in the Sun

I'm usually suspicious of massive new books--most writers who take 800 or 900 pages to tell a story usually do so in an incredibly undisciplined way, and if they weren't so self-indulgent (and had better editors) they could comfortably shave several hundred pages off and have a better book. After all, there aren't many writers who really have the talent to pull off a The Man Without Qualities or a Middlemarch.

However, one upcoming book has certainly got my interest: it's a 968-page novel by filmmaker John Sayles, who has previous form as a novelist. McSweeney's is putting it out (hopefully it's one of their excellent books, rather than one of their infuriating ones), and so has their traditional amazing production values. It looks like a massive, beautiful brick of a book. (Click the first image for a massive version, or the third for a less massive version not obscured by a sticker). The designer is as yet unknown.

The first four chapters were excerpted in an issue of the McSweeney's magazine, in a nice-looking chapbook format:

I always find excerpts like this a bit pointless (hence my dislike of Granta magazine, where half of the fiction always seems to be bits of upcoming novels, rather than stand-alone stories)--if the work is good, you want the whole book, and if it's not, you don't want to read any of it. I know that in this case it's a promotional tool more than anything else, but that doesn't stop me having a whinge.