The world is beginning to catch up with Mary Gaitskill. In the UK, there has been renewed interest following Serpent’s Tail’s 2019 publication of her 15,000 word New Yorker story, ‘This is Pleasure’, as a slim standalone volume last year,[1] followed in 2020 by the publication of her Granta essay ‘Lost Cat’ in an equally slim volume of 90 generously leaded pages.

The raft of single-sitting books published in recent years gives one answer to how publishers can react to a cultural pace set onli...