Review of Contemporary Fiction, special issue, Summer 2009
In 2007, Orion Books produced Moby-Dick in Half the Time, a Compact Edition "sympathetically edited" to "retain all the elements of the originals: the plot, the characters, the social, historical and local backgrounds and the author's language and style."
; or The Whale is an abridgment that preserves the elements missing from that list—digression, texture,
weirdness—by keeping every chapter, word, and punctuation mark of Melville's original Moby Dick; or The Whale
that was removed from Orion's edition.
Press release /
Excerpts /
Interviews I /
II /
Facebook /
Amazon
Believer magazine cover story ("funny and fascinating")
"Decidedly quixotic." —The Globe and Mail
"There's a touch of Pierre Menard about [it]." —London Review blog
"Weird, atmospheric, and compelling.... Once you begin reading this, it's bizarrely difficult to stop." —The Rumpus
"All Moby, no Dick." — Adam Gopnik
Not really. I have logically derived this blurb from what Gopnik actually wrote:
"The Orion 'Moby-Dick' is not defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical
judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be: the contemporary
aesthetic of the realist psychological novel.... [It] cut[s] out the self-indulgent stuff and present[s] a clean story,
inhabited by plausible characters—the 'taut, spare, driving' narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.... You think,
Nice job—what were the missing bits again? And when you go back to find them you remember why the book isn't just
a thrilling adventure with unforgettable characters but a great book. The subtraction does not turn a good work into
hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point,
but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby." (The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007,
p. 68)
