Jonathan Miles

Some novels take up whole city blocks, and some take up, like this one, small, narrow lots.

But I also found my own reading habits influencing what I wanted to write, because ultimately, I always am writing something I want to read.

I mean, I'm my target audience.

And I have been finding myself

increasingly drawn to shorter novels.

And I'm not alone in this.

I don't think it's any surprise why.

I mean, our attention spans are bombarded nowadays, right?

It's almost like we go through our day with somebody tapping us on the shoulder every 30 seconds saying there's a breaking news and there's 50% off on dog toys and there's, you know, and so our attention span is so absolutely assaulted.

that I think it can be difficult for a writer to give the modern reader a doorstop of a book.

And I say that as someone who has published doorstops.

I wanted to reward readers with maybe who would be willing to give me three hours, three or four hours of focus and to fit as much life as I could into that three or four hours for them.

And early readers have mentioned to me that they've read it in one sitting, which I take as a giant compliment because every cook likes to hear there were no leftovers.

Yeah, I mean, I think the one area where I deviate a little bit from the fable tradition is that fables usually have a

a a pretty explicit moral i left that to the reader and you know so you know how it ends you've read it um because and partly that's because as a novelist i start writing because i have questions but i don't write novels to answer the questions if i wanted to do that i would i would i would write essays that's what essays are for right it's more that

Novels are a way of broadening the questions, expanding the questions, multiplying them, giving them a face and a voice.

Milan Kundera once wrote that novels teach us to comprehend the world as a question.

The answer is the story itself.

And what I want readers to take is the intensity of those questions and to have them

see the face of those questions and hear the voice of them.