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I think Novella Month this time around was better than the previous two attempts here at the EWN. Some nice guest posts, more actual new posts from me and not simply regurgitating old novella reviews from the past. #novellamonth at twitter was kept pretty active this year thanks to Nouvella, Lowell Mick White, Open Road Media, and others.
A few other novellas read the past few days without my taking the time to post about them (I was spending that time reading them) that you'll read about here in the future included:
Log of The S.S. The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
This one can be found via Dalkey Archive as they've kept it in print the past four years and see no sign of stopping.
Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams by Steve Stern
This one can soon be found in his forthcoming The Book of Mischief: New & Selected Stories from Graywolf, coming Setpember 4.
Puttermesser and Xanthippe by Cynthia Ozick
This can be found both in her collection of five fictions, Levitation, or later as part of the novel, The Puttermesser Papers.
In all three cases, the author is concerned with both the language and the story and gives both to the reader in spades. Magical Realism is another common factor among all three, and done in that best way possible--in a manner so damn good that you as reader get past the impossibilities within seconds and begin to imagine such a world could absolutely exist.
And remember, if you're looking for novella to read, look back to Kyle Minor's list, or to Melville House or Nouvella.
A guest post from the author of the wonderful Silent Retreats, Philip. F. Deaver:
For the Love of Writing Long by Philip F. Deaver
Novellas are in my personal journey as a writer, so this is as much about the journey as that “intermediate” literary form. A few years ago I spent 10 years writing my Skidmore novel, and the design was a novel in five novellas, with an introductory chapter and a capstone that were normal “chapter” length, whatever that is. Each of the five novellas, though in third person limited, was in a different character’s voice and point of view. They were written to stand alone. But they were written so that, taken together, they formed a continuous narrative, a novel of some length. In it, Mr. Skidmore went on a journey to catch up to many of his old friends to apologize and make amends for things he’d done to them in the past (see my story collection Silent Retreats). Only one of the novella-length chapters is from his point of view, the first one, as he embarks on the journey. The other novellas join the “injured parties” from Skidmore’s past in their semi-settled later lives so that we get to know where they’ve gone after their tumultuous twenties and how things have turned out. In each novella, after we settle in to its story, Skidmore shoots through that world on his supposed mission, like Kahoutek, large and looming, but also neurotic and still mean. As we’d expect from him, his motives for going on the journey aren’t quite as pure as seeking reconciliation. In fact, someone is chasing him.
By the time I wrote this book, titled Past Tense (unpublished), the theme I was interested in had changed from the days of Silent Retreats. I always articulated my theme in the old days as: What happened to men after what happened to women (very 1970s-‘80s). While I don’t think that theme ever made its point, now I’m writing something more akin to: What men do to themselves and each other. It’s quite timely. I’ve come to believe that somewhere in the chemical and genetic scripts of testosterone is written the end of the world.
Bill Clinton is a great example. When he found himself in the White House in the early ‘90s, rumors, theories, and investigations began and chased him his whole presidency. His activities in Arkansas, in elected office, in business and shall we say ‘social,’ were grist for big expensive ruthless investigations by his enemies, and, as time went on, his life in Washington got pretty interesting, too. Republicans (his enemies), still bristling from the humiliation of the humiliation of Richard Nixon, were looking to even the score, and the Clinton presidency seemed to be their opportunity because Clinton was the first Democratic president since the Nixon crater had cooled. Millions of dollars of investigations of both Bill and Hillary, all while the President and First Lady themselves were quite popular in the country, surfaced not much of anything but successfully interfered as much as possible with Clinton’s effective governing. The opposition wanted him to go down even if it was to the detriment of the whole nation. Perhaps this will sound familiar. Anyway, he shoulde
Book Review 2012-015
Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover
1987 by Linden Press, 154 pages
(I bought this a couple of months ago)
Originally published over a decade earlier in a slightly shorter form in American Review 22, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? is Coover's second long work to utilize Richard M. Nixon as a character, though much more subtlely than he did in The Public Burning. In Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, he is referred to as Gus in all but one or two instances, where somebody calls him Dick.
The novella is set in the lte 30's (with ending events occuring specifically on Memorial Day, 1937) in Chicago and the setting up of unions is heavily present. The story itself is told by Meyer, a Russian, Socialist, Jewish artist. Coover has him seemingly telling the story to one that would be familiar with himself, Gus and the other main players, giving the story a bit of a cozy feel for the reader. Meyer announces very early on that Gus has died, and then proceeds to tell the story that leads to this pivotal moment.
The writing in this novella is pretty straightforward compared to Coover's more metafictional efforts. There are a few things he seems to be concentrating on in these pages: history; showing some cracks in the "American Dream," and through his usage of Nixon as Gloomy Gus points to a certain hollowness in Nixon's character.
The book opens:
It's the Duke of Windsor's wedding day. $1300 worth of flowers have arrived at their French chateau to "festoon the nuptials," while back home in baltimore, we're told, Mrs. Simpson's house is being reopened as a shrine and museum. EDWARD BOSSES WALLY AROUND AND SHE LIKES IT. She's in fluted blue today with a bonnet of feathers and tulle. Elsewhere, another Soviet marshal is being shot, a young American is being guillotined in Fascist Germany for plotting against anti-Semites, a supposed has-been named Bill Dietrich pitched a no-hitter for the White Sox, and up in Wisconsin some guy dynamited his whole family just "because they wouldn't help around the farm."
Coover reminds us that history is not one view, one event per day--it's something seen from various angles and persepctives; nothing that is firm and set in stone. The combination of telling the story from the point of view of a Socialist, the usage of certain aspects of Richard M. Nixon's personality, and the struggles to get unions set up pokes holes in the idea of the "American Dream."
Richard M. Nixon was one that earned an early nickname of Iron Butt by using the stick-to-it nature of his personality to do welll in school, thrive in debates, and that sort of thing. Coover has Meyer start Gus' story back in college when he was not doing well in two areas of life (that is true per Nixon biographies)--football or with the ladies. Coover's Gloomy Gus decides to something very Nixonian, he's going to be an Iron Butt, but instead of practicing the type of things like Nixon practiced in real life (like smiling, sadly), he re-arranged his schedule, culling half an hour from his routine to concentrate first on football--starting off with learning how to avoid going offsides.
At first Gus did try to go it alone, using an alarm clock, but the ring was too much like the school bell, and it made him very
Book Review 2012-013
A Political Fable by Robert Coover
1980 by Viking, 88 pages
(I bought this a few weeks ago)
Originally published in a slightly different form over a decade earlier, during the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace 1968 Presidential campaign, in the journal New American Review, under the title "The Cat in the Hat for President," A Political Fable amazingly is still a very fitting novella for us in 2012.
I was all of two during the bulk of that particular Presidential campaign so I can't verify just how much of what Coover has written has come from his watching of campaigns versus his predicting where we were headed, though I am pretty sure there were no fictional candidates in the '68 campaign as The Cat in the Hat that is running is indeed the one from the Dr. Seuss book. What he does give us in this short book is plenty of pretty standard political speak that might even be more appropriate today than it was fourty-four years ago as both major parties nowadays strive so hard to make their candidates appear more centrist than their actual idealogies fall on the map.
The narrator is Soothsayer Brown, the National Chairman of his Party (not defined throughout) who is working his backroom magic to get one of two men slotted in at The Convention so that they will be set up for a good run...four years later. He is positive that the current election is a loss and so is playing the political game of finding a candidate to get their shot, the one they've earned through years of political favors for other candidates, if only to get them their shot knowing they have not a chance in hell of winning. For they are going up against the incumbent, the Opponent:
Born in a small Midwestern town of middle-class parents, reared and educated in the Southwest, known to have considerable holdings and influence in the Eastern establishment, a poker buddy of several Southern Senators, progressive and city-oriented yet bluntly individualistic adn rural in manner, rugged, shrewd, folksy, taciturn yet gregarious, a member of everything from SANE and the NAACP to the American Legion, Southern Baptists, and the National Association of Manufacturers, a chameleon personality who could project the faces of Chairman of the Board, Sheriff, Sunday Duffer, Private Eye, Young Man on the Go, Cracker-barrel Philosopher, Lion-tamer, Dad, Quarterback, Country Gentleman, City Lawyer, Good Sport, Field General, Swinger, and the Guy Next Door, all in one three-minute TV sequence, the Opponent was, in short, a natural.
I know paragraphs like this are somewhat common these days, long lists, but I would have to guess that at the time, such a burst of energy across the page was somewhat uncommon. The energy never stops through this novella. A portion of the impetus for that is The Cat in the Hat, as Coover uses him just as Dr. Seuss had--he's unpredictable, a little mean-spirited, and non-stop activity once he enters a room or a scene.
Where I believe Coover was very prescient in his thoughts on where we were heading with our political system is in how he allows The Cat in the Hat to come in and take over the party through populism and with the help of the media, but also in his pointing out that while we may be swayed by shiny, exciting candidates, in the end the status quo comes back to us.
There are wonderful scenes of members of The Party wearing coonskin caps (a candidate's name was Boone) and the Cat turning them all into real raccoons that en
Maybe it's just me, but there some publishers that I don't think you should be allowed to celebrate Novella Month if you're not willing to mention them. One is Mud Luscious, but I'm saving the for later in the month as I hope to have it coincide with something else. One that makes perfect sense to me to mention is Melville House Press. For one thing, they have a whole series of books titled "The Art of the Novella." There's also the "The Contemporary Art of the Novella" series 
that includes fabulous work like The North of God by Steve Stern.
If I understand properly, as somewhat of a rebel press, they have an affinity for this somewhat of a renegade art form, and I'm very happy that they do. I've picked up and read a fair amount of the titles, both classic and contemporary and never felt slighted once.
They do many other great things over in that little blue house, but when I think of them I usually think of novellas first.
Book Review 2012-011
The Sensualist by Daniel Torday
2012 by Nouvella, 176 pages
(I bought this during the launch period of the title)
Daniel Torday has pretty successfully crossed the Russian novel with the Jewish American short story in his novella, The Sensualist. Torday has set his novella in a heavily Jewish suburb of Baltimore, and then narrowing that setting by having it predominantly deal with high school students. While at first this may seem to limit variables, Torday skirts this issue with both the normal high school cliques, but also by introducting Russian immigrants to the story.
Which leads the reader to a few main players--Samuel Gerson, not "the sensualist" of the title, but a second generation Jewish American, his grandfather hailing from Hungary; Dmitri Zilber, "the sensualist" of the title, arriving in the Baltimore suburbs from Moscow with his mother and sister during his high school years; Yelizaveta Zilber, Dmitri's sister; Tanya Weiss, Samuel's best friend prior to his junior year in high school; and Jeremy Goldstein, a teammate of Samuel's on the high school baseball team their first two years in the school.
The events leading to the beating Dmitri Abramovich Zilber and his friends would administer to Jeremy Goldstein at the end of my junior year of high school--an act that would make them the talk of every household in Pikesville for months after--started before Dmitri and I even met.
And so begins The Sensualist. Looking back at that first paragraph, I noted with interest that Torday fills in his reader right up front with a substantial event that will take place near the end of the book, and because of another event fairly early on, this particular reader had forgotten this opening and was a little surprised when the foreshadowed event occured. Torday also handles this major event in a very interesting way--Samuel Gerson is not present when the beating of Jeremy Goldstein takes place. He's in Long Island with his mother and father as his paternal grandfather has killed himself and they're cleaning his house and making arrangements. So, instead of receiving a first hand account of the incident from our narrator, we instead receive our account through the phone lines as Samuel does himself, when Dmitri calls to tell him that he's found himself in trouble.
Torday had included some interesting parallels between Samuel's grandfather and Dmitri's grandfather--prisoners in their homeland for instance--and through the death of his grandmother, talking more with his grandfather and then the cleaning process of the house, Samuel's coming-of-age takes maybe a silghty different route than had this storyline not been introduced. My long-winded way of saying that I don't think Torday placed Samuel away from the fight specifically to have that phone conversation occur, but I'm glad that it worked out that way as it allowed Dmitri to explain how the fight happened, what led to it, who did what, and what sort of trouble he thought it would lead to. While the novella really is about Samuel's coming-of-age, without Dmitri and his life theories and actions, there is no sensualist.
And what are those theories? What is a sensualist? Per Dmitri, through his readings of Dostoevsky, it is a person that constantly feels all of their emotions, one that acts upon exactly what
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.
Now, I haven't read that book in quite a while. I could be misremembering. (I am very likely misremembering. I feel like I have a terrible memory.) But even if I am misremembering this, I have decided at this point not to go back and find out if this is, in fact, what it says a novella is, because I like thinking that this is what a novella is. I have published one, and have drafts for two more novellas, and I have always followed that definition when writing them. And I have always, when I have picked up another novella, hoped to read a thing that fits that definition.
Because, really, doesn't that sound like exactly the sort of thing you'd like to read?
Matthew Simmons is the author of
A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009),
The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge (Keyhole Press, 2010), and the upcoming collection
Happy Rock (Dark Coast Press, 2013). More things about him can be found at
happyrockisabook.tumblr.com.
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 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
Every so often this month, I'm going to re-post a review of a novella that was originally posted back when I read the novella. This is the first of these "EWN Classic Reviews."
This was originally posted April 9, 2011
Book Review 2011-001
The Mimic’s Own Voice by Tom Williams
April 2011 from Main Street Rag, 97 pages
(This Arc sent to me by the author)
Tom Williams’ novella, The Mimic's Own Voice, is short enough to gobble down in a single reading. I don't advise that though. While I was enjoying the book quite a bit when I was forced to stop a little less than halfway through. When I'd had 24 hours to think about it before finding the necessary time to pick it up again, I found myself thinking about aspects of the story that I hadn't really been focusing on while reading those initial 40 or so pages. Having these thoughts rolling through my mind as I read the rest of Williams' story in a second sitting allowed more aspects to jump out at me and I was able to realize just what a nice job Tom Williams has done in this, his first book.
For one thing, in a relatively short space, Williams gets his reader thinking about race and identity (the protagonist comes from a mixed family racially), as well as our current culture and how we view the famous, and last, but not least, he is able to sneak in some views, satirical in nature, about academia. And he does this all through a unique combination of an autobiography (written in second person), and a fairly omniscient narrator's look at how the autobiography is viewed, as well as how the author of said autobiography was viewed during his life.
"Myles's manuscript, housed now at The Pratt-Falls Center, Dr. Greene's home institution, excited layman and scholars at first, for all suspected it had been written for publication. Yet no contract exists among Myles's papers (and, as the reader shall see, he was quite the saver), nor can one be found in the files of any publishers. This increased speculation that a bidding war for its rights would take place, though after the manuscript's seventy-three handwritten pages were initially read, no offers, save for the Pratt-Falls's, were forthcoming. From its curious usage of second person, to its enigmatic opening and closing lines, "Your name is Douglas Myles . . . . They never really listened," it does not divulge entirely his secrets, while it raises mysteries all its own. Still, there are a host of details which offer, for the first time, a definitive glimpse into his early life."
The author of the autobiography is Douglas Myles, the mimic of the book's title. A fascinating idea by Williams, to use one whose entire celebrity was based on his ability to use other people's voices as a mouthpiece for the ideas presented in the book--seems like a mighty unreliable narrator to me, allowing the reader to decide for his or herself as to what to come away
By the end of the month it's going to look like a whole bunch of authors wrote novellas titled "Definition." Jonathan Baumbach responded with what might be the most common definition, though for one of the first times I've seen, tagged on an explanation for it.
Each work suggests its own length. Distinctions
of content all have their exceptions. My own practice
is not to plot a book but to let it develop on its own from the
germinating idea that set it in motion. A novella is a short
fiction blossoming into something longer that is not quite
a novel. The basic difference between a novel and a short
story is that a novel is a longer work of prose fiction.
A novella is a work of prose fiction that is shorter than
a novel and longer than a short story. This may seem too
obvious to need to be said, but to complicate the issue
is ultimately to falsify.
I like that last sentence. I don't know that I completely agree with it, but I like the authority behind the way he said it.
Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including You, or The Invention of Memory; On The Way To My Father's Funeral: New and Selected Stories; B, A Novel; D-Tours; Separate Hours; Chez Charlotte and Emily; The Life and Times of Major Fiction; Reruns; Babble; and A Man to Conjure With. He has also published over ninety stories published in such places as Esquire, Open City, and Boulevard.
Baumbach, co-founder of The Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America, has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The PEN / O.Henry Prize, and The Best of TriQuarterly. The New York Times Book Review referred to him in 2004 as "an underappreciated writer." He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair."
The paperback version of You, or the Invention of Memory, will be published by Dzanc Books (July 2012) and his next new book, Flight of Brothers, a novella and four stories, will be published by Dzanc Books (July 2013) as well. Many of his backlist titles are coming available through the summer of 2012 through Dzanc's rEprint Series.
Kyle Minor rarely thinks small. When asked if he could maybe let my readers know if there was a novella he would suggest they read, he opted to send me a list...of 100. One thing you'll note is that Kyle is modest and does not include his own novella, "A Day Meant to Do Less," which only was included in Best American Mystery Stories the year it was published. From Kyle:
One hundred novellas you should read, right away (in no particular order):
1. "The Old Forest," by Peter Taylor.
2. "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," by Lee K. Abbott
3. "The Age of Grief," by Jane Smiley
4. "Goodbye, Madagascar," by Jennifer Spiegel
5. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
6. "Auslander," by Michelle Herman
7. Mitko, by Garth Greenwell
8. "All Through the House," by Christopher Coake
9. "The Palace Thief," by Ethan Canin
10. The Barracks Thief, by Tobias Wolff
11. "The Dew Breaker," by Edwidge Danticat
12. Street of Lost Footsteps, by Lyonel Trouillot
13. "The Beast God Forget to Invent," by Jim Harrison
14. Clown Girl, by Monica Drake
15. "The Womanizer," by Richard Ford
16. "The Bear," by William Faulkner
17. "The Talk Talked Between Worms," by Lee K. Abbott
18. "Gusev," by Anton Chekhov
19. "Fathers and Sons," by Ivan Turgenev
20. "The Death of Ivan Ilych," by Leo Tolstoy
21. "Heart of Darkness," by Joseph Conrad
22. Steps, by Jerzy Koszinski
23. From Old Notebooks, by Evan Lavender-Smith
24. Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
25. Indignation, by Philip Roth
26. Everyman, by Philip Roth
27. "Goodbye, Columbus," by Philip Roth
28. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow
30. "Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin
31. "Makedonija," by Miroslav Penkov
Seeing as I bailed early on (as in, during my first post) in explaining what exactly a novella is, the fine author, Andrew Ervin, has come to the rescue with his explanation--I'm hoping this is the first of many of these this month.
What is a novella? I have no idea. But I think it has something to do with now outdated methods of commercial categorization. Let me step back from the question a tiny bit.
I don’t believe in genre. Anyone who has ever attempted to organize a compact disc collection will know what I mean. Where do you put Sinatra? With the Jazz? The Pop Music? He would seem to fit more at home with The Beatles than John Coltrane, but, then again, he might be easier to find if he’s near Count Basie and not Radiohead. And Radiohead at their best shares some aesthetic sensibilities with Messiaen and maybe even Ligeti, who are hanging out over in Classical. These categories—Classical, Jazz, Pop—are artificial constructs imposed upon the art to turn them into commercial products we could easily locate at Borders. Little wonder that that excluded-middle model—a product is either x or y—has bankrupted retailers and been replaced by systems of information architecture and information retrieval (to borrow the wonderful term from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil) by which an iPod can use multiple criteria, not solely genre, which is artificial anyway, to locate Brad Mehldau’s cover version of “Paranoid Android.”
You see where I’m going here. The label “novella” is not inherent in the work of art; it’s a sticker publishers and editors place on the outside of it so that consumers can find it. Art and commerce have always been uneasy bedfellows, but they manage to get along because they have to. Personally, I’ve never set out to write a novella for the sake of writing a novella. In Extraordinary Renditions, I had three stories I wanted to tell and that form (again, which fairly or not has a kind of anti-commercial reputation) suited the thematic concerns. Had “The Empty Chairs” or “Brooking the Devil” required ten pages or a thousand pages to get the story across, that’s how long I would have made them and it would have been an entirely different kind of book.
Fortunately, many publishers are beginning to see the limitations of the current model. More houses are publishing novellas these days, which warms the cockles of my heart. Maybe the emergence of e-readers will further revitalize the novella; it feels like the perfect length for reading on a screen. We may see yet another beautiful example of technology opening up the field of what’s commercially viable for writers. As for my own work, and maybe this will change one day soon, I’m not sure that commercial viability would even crack the top ten list of what I want to accomplish on the page. If it did, I probably would not have written novellas.
Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press) and is a great reviewer of books, as well as all-around good guy (I penned this, not Andrew)
I'm always a little lost in the wilderness when it comes to just what exactly is a novella. Two years ago I had a few authors that had published novellas give me their definitions but I'm afraid they were mostly a little too smart for me. I know I don't simply believe it's a word or page count. I think there's something that differentiates a novella from a long short story, and from a short novel as well--I just don't know what exactly that is.
A long-winded introduction to say that I'm not fully sure that Joseph McElroy's Preparations for Search is a novella, but it feels like it to me. Originally this material was a portion of McElroy's novel, Women and Men, that was removed. He published it rather quietly in the journal Formations in 1984. Small Anchor Press then published it as a square-bound book with some slight revisions to the text that sold out rather quickly. It has recently been published in eBook form by Dzanc Books in their rEprint Series with an introduction by Mike Heppner.
From this introduction:
In conversation with Joseph McElroy, I once described his short novel Preparations for Search in genre terms as "noir-core," in which the conventions of noir are flattened and compressed into dense, jet-black space, a gravitational singularity...There's a sense of noir in Preparations for Search as well, "noir" as defined by George Tuttle as a subcategory of hardboiled detective fiction in which "the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator"...One could say that McElroy, in both his novels and short fiction, invites us to become sleuths as we plunder, decode, hypothesize about and interrogate his information-rich narratives. But what makes Preparations for Search "noir-core" is McElroy's approach to tempo and tone. Here the prose is so tightly wound—the pace accelerated to two-hundred beats-per-minute—that what we're left with is the structural essence of noir 
without the flabby clichés.
An example of McElroy's writing, Preparations for Search begins:
It was only money, but it was quite a lot of money and I told him I felt I couldn't let him have it. Enos said he could understand. I said what he did with the money was his business, but--eleven hundred dollars to pay a detective to track down someone Enos hadn't seen since he was two? He looked me in the eye and asked if it was true that what he did with the money was his business. "What money?" I said, and he laughed and said didn't I mean whose money?
And so it begins. That last line of what I've quoted of Heppner's introduction perfectly describes McElroy's work here. The pace of the book does accelerate with the lack of excess, or cliche, that one might
Two years ago, the EWN celebrated Novella Month in June hot on the heels of year four (I think) of Short Story Month. Last year, not so much. This year, it's been revived as Deena Drewis over at the wonderful Nouvella, has got things moving--the logo is stolen from their site.
I'm looking forward to reading, discussing, reviewing, etc. some novellas, some publishers that concentrate on novellas, and more.
On twitter, look for #novellamonth
I'm not sure I know, Dan, what makes a novella a novella, or what makes a
novel a novel, or a poem a poem or a story a story. What I do know, or
what I think I know, is what makes a sentence an invigorating,
sensation-giving, living, breathing sentence. When a writer is able to
string together enough of those kinds of sentences in some sort of
sequence, I might be willing to claim that what we then have on our
hands is what most people might safely refer to as a story. When a
writer is able to sustain such a sequence of sentences over a length of
time on the page that might stretch out beyond more than a handful of
pages (or fifty or seventy-five pages) I suppose we have to call what
those sentences make a longer story, or a novella. I'm sure folks like John Gardner and other
literary smarty-pants have more rigid ideas to lean their elbows on so
I'll leave that sort of definition-making to folks more schooled in
these sorts of things than I am or will ever claim to be.
It's
true that I've written three such pieces—in recent issues of Black Warrior
Review and Unsaid— that have stretched out beyond the page-limits of
what might be seen as a conventionally-lengthed short work of fiction,
though in each case they each did so without my intention for them to do
so having anything to do with how far the sentences within were willing
to take me. I am always simply taken, in all instances when I am lucky
enough to be inside the writing of a piece of fiction, and I allow
myself, when I can, to be taken and to ride those sentences for as long
as they might have me as a tagger-along.
Peter Markus is the author of four books: Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, The Singing Fish, and Bob, or Man on Boat. His next book, We Make Mud, is due out from Dzanc Books in March 2011.
Look forward to much more about this man on this blog in the near future, in July we'll have something akin to what we did with Percival Everett last year.
Here's an analogy: If a short story is a
doll's house and a novel is a rambling abode of many mansions, which you
may enter and explore at your leisure, then the novella is a modest
structure--say, a cottage--whose occupants you're forced to spy upon
through its windows. So what if the novella denies you the primary
intimacy with its characters that a novel affords; it enhances your
awareness of the mystery of their movements, the allusiveness of their
speech, while at the same time preserving your appreciation for the
beautiful symmetry of the structure that contains them.
Steve Stern, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, is the author of several previous novels and novellas. He teaches at Skidmore College in upstate New York. His most recent novel, The Frozen Rabbi, was just published last month by Algonquin.
A question maybe I could have asked before the 20th of the month - what is your favorite novella? Also, have you read any new novellas this month yet?
What a refreshing question—one that nobody asks these
days. In the late 19th-Century,
the novella was a popular form.
Magazines printed them and paid well for them and readers devoured them
so ravenously that when Henry James published “Daisy Miller” in a popular
magazine, he became instantly infamous for his depiction of an American girl of
loose morals. The form was so good to
James that he called it the “blessed novella.”
Alas, today it is an orphaned form, rarely able to find a home in either
books (publishers have no faith in marketing novellas) or in literary
magazines, which have little space to dedicate to a form that requires so many
pages.
My favorite thing about reading and writing novellas (and I
have written four of them, to my agent’s chagrin) is the way the form can have
the propulsive focus of the short story without compromising the expansiveness
of character and event of the novel.
While a short story may show you one or two things about a character, it
does so mostly by suggestion and implication.
Novels, on the other hand, can give us the sense of intimately knowing a
character as well as we think we know ourselves. At the same time, a novel, especially a
larger one, can fatigue the reader with a pleasant sort of boredom that comes
from knowing someone or something too deeply or for too long. After page 200 or 250 or 450, the novel can
lose some of its power to surprise us, to show us something entirely new. As a hybrid form that is at once a compressed
novel and an expansive short story, the novella joins the strengths of both
forms. In 50-120 pages or so, a skilled
writer can sustain tension and suspense while at the same time drawing a full
portrait of several characters.
I’d like to point interested readers to some of the best
novellas of recent decades so that they can see for themselves just how powerful
the form can be. I wonder how many
people know of or have read the classic novella “Light in the Piazza” by
Elizabeth Spencer. It’s absolutely
beautiful, stunningly so, and possesses the compression of the story and the
expansiveness of the novel that I talk about above. It’s a must read. “The Age of Grief” by Jane Smiley is, I
think, her best work and comes in at just over a hundred pages. William Trevor’s “Nights at the Alexandra”
leaves one floored with its tone of aching sadness and nostalgia. More recently Jim Harrison’s “A Beast God
Forgot to Invent” blew me away. No doubt
many have already read Ian McEwan’s On
Chesil Beach, which, with the help of huge font, was sold as a novel. But, in fact, it’s a novella.
One last thought: Why don’t novellas sell in our country as
stand-alone books? I’m in France as I
write this and can walk into a bookstore and purchase any number of beautiful
little paperbacks that the French refer to as “nouvelle” (strictly translated,
this means short story). They run from
80-150 pages, are cheaper than full-length novels, and clearly have an audience
here. In fact, one best-selling fiction
writer, Amélie Nothomb (she’s Belgian but writes in French), publishes almost
exclusively in this form. Clearly, the
French publishing industry takes the form seriously and French readers do,
too. So perhaps the novella only goes
begging on our
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 <
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
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.
THE NOVELLA
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.
--
The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, Hesh Kestin's well-received
new novel, is now available through bookstores or online via Amazon and
Barnes & Noble. Want to read the first chapter for free? Go to
http://www.dzancbooks.org/store/kestin-shoeshine.html
--only for you! Or check out this video at
http://www.dzancbooks.org/multimedia.html
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).
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.
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