25 May 2015
When Doubleday editor Gerald Howard acquired Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, a 736-page novel about a New Yorker with a hellish past, he told her they'd have to cut it down by a third. She countered that Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, both longer than her book, were poised to do pretty well that year. She also emailed a list of successful long novels, as well as a "passive-aggressive picture" of her manuscript beside a 900-page issue of Vogue and a paperback copy of Vikram Seth's 1,400-page classic, A Suitable Boy.
