One big book …

… A History of the Novel in Two Hundred Essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Though he is remembered primarily for being one of the most prodigious and best-loved short-story writers of the twentieth century, Pritchett was a tireless book critic, contributing frequently to the pages of The New Statesman, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. His literary essays were once cherished by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Anthony Burgess. Susan Sontag discovered Pritchett’s reviews when she was a graduate student at Harvard, and later described the encounter as “a revelation”: “I didn’t know you could write about literature in such a way, that you could be lyrical and precise and not carry a huge burden of judgment.” Gore Vidal called Pritchett “our greatest English-language critic.”