“In August: all the pharmacies in New York run out of Adderall: A Supply Chain Breakdown,” begins Anika Jade Levy’s 2025 debut novel, “Flat Earth.” What follows is a story told in hasty paragraphs, pithy fragments and cynical dispatches from a conspiracy theory-infested America. Yet the novel, while uniquely contemporary, joins a larger canon of fragmentary novels that resonate in our digital age of dwindling attention spans.
“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill is a forebear of the short-and-sweet literary canon. “The vogue when I was writing ‘Dept. of Speculation’ was for realist doorstopper books that were self-consciously about big ideas,” explains the novelist, who published her now-classic fragmentary novel in 2014. “Short novels and so-called autofiction were not being published much.”
Like the protagonists of Levy’s novel, today’s readers want speed. Like the population of American readers, page counts in contemporary literature have been shrinking. This includes paragraphs, even sentences. Epic novels like the 800-page “Anna Karenina” have fallen out of favor, replaced by short, incisive literature that mimics our digital lives. A 2022 study by WordsRated, an international research group, showed that bestselling books are getting shorter. The study found that within the last decade, the average length of a New York Times bestseller dropped by more than 50 pages.
“If you go back 100 years and look for an amazing book to read, it’s probably going to be 500 to 600 pages long,” said Mitchum Huehls, an English professor at UCLA. “If you do that today, you’re hard-pressed to find a great book that’s 500 to 600 pages long.”
The answer is complicated and dictated by trends in literature. John Steinbeck’s classic 1952 novel “East of Eden” begins with a lengthy and exhaustive description of the Salinas Valley. This masterful rumination on setting seems like an anomaly in contemporary literature. “I think literature used to be much more committed to creating a world, creating a scene,” Huehls said. “Now it’s a lot about plot and action or character — not so much setting and scene location, which is what you get with Tolstoy or John Dos Passos.”
While shortening attention spans may be to blame for the shift in literature, Huehls argues that some writers are intentionally engaging with it. The resulting novels are poignant, urgent and brilliant. “There’s also a lot of interesting formal experimentation — taking technological forms and integrating them, or running literary questions up against those forms,” he said, citing writers like Offill, Jennifer Egan, Tao Lin and Ling Ma, who have found ways to merge technology into the literary canon.
Levy said she was influenced by the fragmentary literary canon while writing “Flat Earth.” “I think that speedy prose is actually pretty timeless. You look at Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’ — it’s right there in the title,” Levy said of the 1976 novel. “The concerns of the book are very contemporary, but on a formal and line level, I was working in a tradition.”
Levy argues that fragmentary writing feels more authentic to current reality. “Contemporary life feels increasingly episodic. It’s hard for me to conceive of my existence as a linear narrative with a coherent arc. So fragmented writing feels like a formal way into writing realism when I’ve never experienced reality as a single, continuous story,” she said.
Levy was shaped by the fragmentary canon while writing “Flat Earth.” She cites Mary Robison’s “Why Did I Ever,” Adler’s “Speedboat” and Offill as influences. “I read ‘Dept. of Speculation’ when it came out, but I returned to it when I was editing ‘Flat Earth’ to figure out how to deal with dialogue, scene work and transitions inside of a fragmented constraint.”
“It’s the combination of everything I write being really derivative and informed by everything I’ve ever read and then trying to do something new,” Levy said.
In 2014, Offill’s novel “Dept. of Speculation” was published and became lauded for its fragmentary style, often unwieldy single sentences that offered a complicated portrait of marriage. In 2015, the book was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The novel became an artifact of the contemporary moment. “I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that comes at me on any given day. When I write, I want to try to quiet the noise by paring my thoughts down to what feels most essential,” Offill said. “Emotional momentum is very important to me, and I try to create a feeling of that in my work. To do that, I try to follow Waldo Salt’s dictum: ‘Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.’”
Offill stumbled upon the style organically as a new mother, she explained. “I wrote ‘Dept. of Speculation’ in little scraps just after I had a baby,” she says. “The style evolved out of necessity at first, but I was also trying to find a way to capture the fragmentary nature of my thoughts and the strange way time seemed to be moving in fits and starts.”
While the fragmentary style mirrors the internet age, Offill doesn’t necessarily think the trend is permanent. “I think literature is always adapting to the moment we live in,” she said. “I’m not on social media, and my short novels take me a ridiculous number of years to write, but like everyone else, I’m influenced by the internet and the endless options of what to watch and listen to and read.”
Offill predicts a near future in which readers will once again rejoice in epic novels. “Lately, I think we’re swinging back in the direction of ‘the big, baggy monster’ idea of what a novel is,” Offill remarks. “I’ve seen a lot of new writers who seem to be following in the footsteps of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, writing novels with sentences that go on for pages and pages. I’m a Bernhard fan, so I’m interested to see where this goes. I’d like to think that there’s room for all of these styles.”
Connors is a writer living in Los Angeles. She hosts the literary reading event Unreliable Narrators at Nico’s Wines in Atwater Village every month.
