The novel is a slow art form in more ways than one. While long genre fiction makes for a fast reading experience, characterized by suspense and narrative urgency, ‘slow’ narrative design, the art of complicating fictional worlds, has always been the domain of the long literary novel. Of course, short experimental forms can be difficult reads, too; as Roy Sommer's upcoming book will argue, however, it is the longform novel with its narrative excess, stylistic exuberance, labyrinthine plots, complex character constellations, intertextual networks, recursive structures, strategic redundancy and sheer scope that poses the biggest challenge to readerly attention – and allows us to think of reading as a subversive cultural strategy, challenging the commodification of time.

This project has received funding from the VolkswagenStiftung