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From the back of the box that holds Interventions:

In what many perceive as a coldly relentless digital age, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Russo has teamed up with his daughter, artist Kate Russo, to create this tribute to the printed  book. This handsome and inventive format combines the previously unpublished novella Intervention with three shorter works, two of which have not been published in book form.

     The four tales in Interventions ccrackle with Russo's perceptive wit and unwavering compassion for the human condition; and each volume is paired with a small color print of a painting by Kate Russo. Inspired byt he psychological landscape, these  paintings explore the dark places of the characters' psyches, that fear or injustice they obsess about.

     Printed in the United States on the finest sustainably harvested papers, the set is as much a joy to hold in the hand as it is to read.

While I don't fully agree with the first ten words of the description, I am glad that his own belief in those words caused Russo to put this project together. I was completely unaware of this before last night, when I was attending a reading at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor. I saw Russo's name looking out at me from the new fiction cart at the front of the store and having been a fan of his since Vintage re-released The Risk Pool and Mohawk, I picked it up and that's when I realized it was something different, not a standard  book, but a box with four smaller printings inside it, one for the novella and each of the three stories included (quick side note--you all should visit Nicola's if only to have David McLendon help you out--an incredibly generous and  man knowing of al things literary--just a great bookseller). The fact that it had a previously unpublished novella during the month of June  made it seem like an item that had to go to the counter with me.

Intervension, the novella, is a really solid and quick read. A tale of mortality, of friendship, of family, of marital relationships, it features much of what  makes Russo's writing stand out. The questions or issues that arise during the  course of the novella are pretty much all tied together by the end, though not in a way that hammers  the reader over the head--Russo does this tying together in a nice, slow, and what seems to be a proper manner. He's given his readers very believable characters and situations for them to wallow around in.

The books themselves within the box are very nice. It was obviously a labor of love putting this project together. I'm not fully sure I understand how the print that was within this novella fits it any more than the prints inside the short stories would have fit, but so long as it makes sense to the author and painter, I suppose that's enough. The combination of the effort though, and t

Another definition that I like a lot--this time from Matthew Simmons:

I read a book some time ago called, I think, Twelve German Novellas, and in the intro it mentioned that early on "novella" was not just a way to refer to a length, but a style as well. A novella, it said, was a longer short story, concisely plotted, and with a twist somewhere in the middle that sends the story careening off in an unexpected direction.

Today we have a definition from J.A. Tyler, publisher at Mud Luscious Press:

Obviously, as a publisher of novel(la)s, we are in love with the form. And here is a short definition of the field as we see it, as well as a fun misconception we’d love to address:

Since our start, Mud Luscious Press has called a ‘novella’, a ‘novel(la)’, and most wrongly assume that those parentheses are an attempt to highlight the ‘la’ as a reference to the poetry, the ‘song’ of the works we publish. And while this is a nice, if wholly unintended consequence of those parentheses, they are in fact meant to highlight the word ‘novel’ embedded within novella, a reminder that well-written novellas are novels in all sense of the word: they have fully formed narratives, engaging characters, subtle and strong motifs, and all the other wonderful magic of a good book; and for us, the extra special beauty of a good novel(la) is that it does all of these things but in a more finite space, forcing the text to live, in our opinion, a tad more vividly, with a somewhat greater punch to the readerly throat. 

J. A. Tyler is the author of several books including the recently released Variations of a Brother War and the forthcoming The Zoo, A Going. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. For more on his writing, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com.

From Europa Editions (2009), Valeria Parrella's debut in English (translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar), For Grace Received, contains four novellas of Modern Naples.  A review is forthcoming but I've read two of the four and enjoyed them quite a bit.

From the publisher: 

Winner of the 2005 Renato Fusini Prize, the 2006 Zerilli-Marimò Prize, and among the finalists for Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega, For Grace Received announces the English debut of a remarkable new literary talent.

Here we go with another definition of what a novella is:

The Novella: A novella is like the 13" inch single from your favorite band. It's a remix of a good short story into a longer, freer format, where structure and sentence open up and things happen faster or slower but at the same time just right. My novella, I Can Make It to California Before It's Time for Dinner, actually began as a short story by the same name. I didn't think I could carry the voice through a whole novel, but the short story bothered me enough, in its containment, to want to set it free in some other way, see what happened next. And then it was just right. The novella is the baby bear of literature for us Goldilocks writers.

bio: Jen Michalski's first collection of fiction, Close Encounters (2007), is available from So New, and her second book is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013). She is the editor of the anthology City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010) and the editor of jmww (http://jmww.150m.com).

is a muscular fella,

not an idea like a story

but a world itself whose glory

is in concision, impact and wit:

unpadded, unexpanded, unfit

for summer reading

or  academing

--it’s single redeeming

grace: no added couth

obscures its truth.

The usual take is either that

it’s a novel, unfinished, still flat

or a story volumized 

in size. Dead wrong. 

The novella is the core

of all, not one word

less --or more.

A few more sites have recently noticed that it is novella month!  This could potentially mean more and more and more great novella suggestions for us all.  Like Fire; Jesse Gordon -- the geek, that is; and POD People, which also has a great in-depth post about the novella as a form.

Book Review 2010-007
All the Day's Sad Stories by Tina May Hall
2009 by Caketrain, 96 pages

I bought this one

Tina May Hall's novella, All the Day's Sad Stories, won the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Brian Evenson. 

It's certainly not hard to see why this manuscript would creep to the top of Evenson's stack - Hall writes of Jake and Mercy, a married couple striving to have a child, while undergoing one hell of a rough year.  Jake quits his job to become an online poker player; they kill a dog while driving in a rainstorm; chalk X's mysteriously appear all around their house and yard; Mercy cheats on Jake, though like much of their lives, not in a fully successful manner; and all the while, Mercy's blood flows regularly.

Hall has a seemingly simple way with her language - short sentences without a flashy vocabulary.  However, these sentences also tend to capture whatever she is describing fully.  One assumes Tina May Hall is one observant person as she slips in details that allow the reader to envision the scene. 

The man fingers a bit of bread that has fallen next to his plate, rolls a ball and flattens it.  "It's funny," he says, eyes trained on the row of crumbs he is aligning.  "I used to yell at that idiot mutt ten times a day."  Mercy touches his elbow, hesitantly.  His arm goes still as if she is a wild animal he is afraid of startling. He says, "You guys are nice people, good people, I can tell."  She clears the dishes as Jake leads him to the front door.  Jake comes back with a plastic tub half-filled with Chiclets and says, "He wouldn't take no for an answer."  Mercy remembers chicken fried steak at a roadhouse called the Chuck Wagon near her grandmother's farm, the begged nickel, a handful of lacquered gum, the blissful ache of sugar seeping into teeth.

Hall just packs the end of this scene, <spoiler alert> where the couple finds out that the owner of the dog that they hit with their truck is who has been leaving the chalk X's on their property.  Mercy invites him in for dinner.  This is at the end of that dinner - there are the specifics of the bread crumbs, the bread itself and the man's physical attachment to it.  Hall also brings things to a larger scale with the inclusion of the Chiclets and Mercy's memory of childhood.

The fragmentary style of the novella, there are 48 titled chapters, or sections, none of which is longer than a page and a half, fits with Hall's writing well.  It allows her to slide her characters in and out of various situations quickly, allowing the reader to get a full scope, especially of Mercy and her actions, and even the thoughts leading to these actions.  Much like Hall's effectively short and to the point sentences, so are her sectioned scenarios.  All combined, it leads to a very well written and interesting debut.  One well worth your time to try to track down and enjoy.

4 stars

Back to the novellas to hopefully roar through the second half of Novella Month with plenty of content - this, a definition of the novella from Kyle Minor:

Plenty of writers and critics have attempted to define the novella based upon a word count, which starts at 10,000 or 30,000 words and ends around 25,000 or 59,000 words. That's the kind of shaky math I'm happy to endorse. But I'd rather see the novella defined by a combination of quantitative and qualitative grounds. It has to be longer than a story and shorter than a novel, but it also has to feel different than a story and different than a novel. I'm hard-pressed to find anything novella-like about The Great Gatsby or Seize the Day or Slaughterhouse-Five, despite their brevity. They're novels. And I can't see declaring James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" or Lee K. Abbott's "One of Star Wars, One of Doom" anything but short stories. Long short stories, maybe.  They've got that feeling of enclosedness you get when you read a short story. I think the novella is the form where you get to stretch the short story past its place of elegant concision, so instead of breaking in the right place, it goes on and on past the right place, the way life does, so the meaning it makes is the kind of meaning the length of life makes rather than the kind of meaning a single episode makes. (See Peter Taylor's "The Old Forest" or Jane Smiley's "The Age of Grief.") Or: the novella is the form where you get to dispense with scene whenever you feel like it, and compress generations into seventy or ninety pages. (See Jim Harrison's "Legends of the Fall.") Or: the novella is the place where you get to traffic in multiple points of view at story-length for each, so that we see with great concision how we're missing one another. (See Rick Moody's "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven.") Or: the novella is the great form of incompleteness, where loose ends must remain forever unbound, because life doesn't offer up such answers. (See Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams.") Or: the novella is the proper length for the epistolary form (Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station"), the altered-consciousness experiment (Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"), the coming-of-age story (Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus"), and all fables featuring people made of spare parts (George Saunders's The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.) The novella is, in short but at long, the form best suited to all mean-it-forever experiments in form, in function, in fun-making, in fundamentalism, in fertilization, and in firmament firebombing.

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of <