The Longcut

by Emily Hall · 2023

Emily Hall’s *The Longcut* follows an unnamed artist who can’t quite name her own work. While wandering the familiar streets of her city en route to a gallery meeting, she spirals into a series of mental detours that expose the absurdities of her daily life—a drab office job where she ticks items off a “completed” column, sleepless nights in a cramped studio‑apartment, and cryptic conversations with a friend who may understand her better than she does herself. Along the way she wrestles with riddles about the nature of perception—what separates the photographed world from reality, why objects decay differently in varied contexts, and even the elusive shade of Cambridge blue. Hall’s prose is a deft, comic dance of syntax that resists easy answers, turning the protagonist’s search for artistic identity into a broader meditation on the role of the artist in a world that constantly asks, “What is art?”