From Representative Fictions, a review of a new two-volume treatise entitled, The Novel (which, itself, is based on an original, five-volume series published in Italian): “Rather than painstakingly interpreting the complexly integrated elements of a single text, distant reading conducts quantitative analyses of particular elements across hundreds of texts at once–the geographical location in which they take place, for instance–treating Middlemarch, say, no differently from the dozens of potboilers and weepies published in the same era. Now [The Novel's editor] Moretti can construct theories about every novel ever written, without even, as he has come to boast, having to read them at all.”