From Haruki Murakami to George RR Martin, both commercial and literary fiction have fallen in love with epic length. Why?
From a piece in the Guardian...
Has there ever been an autumn season so rich in fat books? George RR Martin's latest fantasy whopper, A Dance with Dragons (1,040 pages), was swiftly followed by Neal Stephenson's sci-fi epic Reamde (912); and their efforts will be joined on Tuesday by Stephen King's 11.22.63, depicting a time-travelling teacher seeking to prevent John F Kennedy's assassination, which, while failing to match the 1,074 pages of King's previous novel, Under the Dome, still asserts that he can keep up with the upstarts in reality-altering fiction by coming in at 740 pages.
Literary authors have contributed to this bumper harvest too, with Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, itself not lacking in sci-fi elements, doing most to destroy forests with a three-volume combined pagination just short of the virility-verifying 1,000-page marker. Also in autumnal lit fic, Adam Levin's The Instructions and Peter Nadas's Parallel Stories both managed to produce 1,000-plus pagers. And that's what's changed about the size issue today – it cuts across publishing's class system.
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