The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Special Fiction Issue; Or the Whale

In 2007, Orion Press put out a series of abridged classics, including Moby-Dick In Half the Time. Adam Gopnik famously called the Melville abridgment all Dick, no Moby but what actually happens when the work of a writer of texture and digression is cut in the service of clarity and plot?; or The Whale consists of every chapter, word, and punctuation mark, saved from the abridgers by Damion Searls. Some chapters of; or The Whale are virtually untouched, while others consist only of a single adverb, or streams of punctuation. The result is beautiful, ridiculous, and gripping and has a serious point to make about the literary values worth abridging for.