Category Archives: Novellas

1. Prayer for the Dying, by Stewart O’Nan
Is this a novella? At under 200 pages, it’s slim and horrifying and gorgeous, one of my favorite books of all time. This one poor guy is the Sheriff, the Undertaker, and the Doctor for a small town after the Civil War and he’s really trying his hardest. And then a plague hits.

2. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
One we all read way back when, and tell me honestly: have you ever been able to forget it? (Even better, I think, at thrusting you into what it must be like to be retarded than Of Mice and Men, whose ending I spent a lot of time furiously rewriting in the ninth grade, while calling out curses to the author.) And what happens in this one is even worse. God, I wish I’d somehow thought of it myself.

3. Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson
What Raymond Carver did for his generation, Dennis Johnson did for ours. The weird poetic humor and dense unaffected tragedy here have been envied by everyone now who wants to write. Me, too.

4. Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen
Do you know a teenage girl? Give her this book. (And I’ll admit it: this one might be cheating, because it’s not fiction. But it reads like it is, and Kaysen’s spare prose packs in so much truly inventive wordplay and tricks of narrative that sneak up on you to tap you on the shoulder. No, your other shoulder.)

5. The Good Times are Killing Me, by Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry writes like no one else—on nearly every page I’m awestruck—and the nakedly hilarious weird honesty makes you get filled up with exuberance and then suddenly you’re crying. Just like adolescence.

6. Fauntleroy’s Ghost, by Vinnie Wilhelm
I thought I’d take a peek at this one morning and then I was late to work because I just could not put it down. Ambitious, arch and witty with a strong driving plot and fifty surprises to go with your heartswellings. Also there’s a part about Fidel Castro’s penis you won’t soon forget.

7. Ballad of the Sad Café, by Carson McCullers
Somehow McCuller’s gusto and force makes the most bizarre love story feel really true and natural, so that even when details start to verge on the realm of magical realism it all just teeters and balances perfectly. Plus, the lovers all hate each other until they finally grease themselves up and fight. Which is even better than it sounds.

8. Where We Come From, by Judy Budnitz
A woman is gigantically pregnant for years and years in the title piece from Nice Big American Baby, but first we begin with her seven brothers and her abandonment of her own mother and then we move into her many foiled attempts to catapult herself across the border so that she can give birth on American soil, so that a whole world and three generations of struggle are all carried on the strange back of this strange plot.

9. Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis
So bizarre. And so perfect. Everything in this story runs backwards, literally, starting with a character jumping up out of his coffin and being carried back to his bed where he slowly gets well. Once a week, a maid comes to his house and messes everything up. A hurt knee is mended by a quick slap to the concrete. I was so into this that I didn’t even anticipate the mind-blowing turn in the middle. And then the magical joke of the narrative suddenly closes in on you and you realize that there is so much more going on here and that what’s going on will break your heart.

10. Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
You know how if you were a really amazing artist you could just capture real life and it would be art? I’m awestruck by the beauty and realness of the humor and heartbreak here, and the naturalistic take on our daily lives now. As if Seize the Day were written about the Red Lobster.

11. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

12. Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman

13. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

14. Hounds of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

15. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

16. Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

17. Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood

18. Project X, by Jim Shepard

19. Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West

20. Tony Takitani, by Haruki Murakami

21. Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth

K. Kvashay-Boyle is a fiction writer living in Los Angeles. Her stories are widely anthologized in places such as Best of McSweeney’s, Best American Non-Required Reading, Politically Inspired Fiction. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won one of 15 best stories by Pittsburg Arts and Letters American Short Reading Series, and her story “Saint Chola” is currently in development as a feature film.

Some of my favorite novellas. My only constraint: not books written in English.

In no particular order:

1. Molloy, by Samuel Beckett

2. Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo

3. The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector

4. Concrete, by Thomas Bernhard

5. The Ravishing of Lol Stein, by Marguerite Duras

6. Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

7. Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal el Saadawi

8. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

9. Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe

10. The Centaur in the Garden, by Moacyr Scliar

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Arbitrary Tales and The Ecstasy of Capitulation, and numerous works in translation. Find him HERE.

10. Marcovaldo, by Italo Calvino
The main character in Marcovaldo is called Marcovaldo. I like him a lot. I think he is a good person trying to do his best and I like that about him. Calvino could do anything he wanted.

9. Et Tu, Babe, by Mark Leyner
Lots of things happen in this little book. The President explains how he has sex with his wife who is the size of a Times New Roman lower-case ‘o’. I like the blurb on this book almost as much as the book itself: “A portrait of the artist as a flashbulb-tanned, steroid-swollen, priapic monster.” Good, right?

8. Pafko at the Wall , by Don DeLillo
I think this on its own is probably better than Underworld as a whole. I feel strongly that DeLillo did something very right with this. When I think of it, I think of sick all over Frank Sinatra’s sleeve.

7. Snow White, by Donald Barthelme
Out of everyone, I am most happy that Barthelme existed. I like to hold this book in front of my face and flick the pages and sort of half pay attention. “A canned good is more interesting than him.” Such a good line.

6. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders
I felt sad and political when I read this. Saunders makes me feel how serious silliness is. He makes me optimistic and scared.

5. Small Pale Humans, by Daniel Spinks
This is my favourite thing on the internet. Bear Parade was among the first things I read when I was starting to appreciate ‘internet literature’. Small Pale Humans is almost certainly the longest thing that I have read on the internet without realizing I was reading something on the internet.

4. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
I am 90% certain that The Metamorphosis is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. There’s an audio version of it that I absolutely love. In my imagination, I am giving Kafka a hug with my trousers around my ankles, crying my eyes out.

3. In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan
This book is the most gentle thing I have ever read.

2. Christie Malry Own Double Entry, by B.S. Johnson
I wish people like B.S. Johnson wouldn’t kill themselves. It seems much more difficult with the knowledge that B.S. Johnson, John Kennedy Toole and David Foster Wallace couldn’t hang on. Just now I want to squat on the kitchen counter and for my head to explode, straight upwards, and keep going.

1. The Dead, by James Joyce
I feel embarrassed trying to write about The Dead. If you haven’t read The Dead, read The Dead. If you have, perhaps you know what I mean.

Crispin Best’s debut chapbook MEN was recently published. His short fiction has appeared online at Eyeshot, Wigleaf, Robot Melon and many others. He has lived in Tokyo, Manchester and Cambridge but now lives back in London, next door to the house he grew up in. Find him HERE.

The Brotherhood of Mutilation and Last Days, by Brian Evenson
Most likely, the only way new readers are going to come to these novellas now will be through their combined form in Evenson’s novel Last Days, but it’s still interesting to think of how they once existed independently of each other. It’s hard for me now to imagine how terrifying The Brotherhood of Mutilation must have been by itself, published years before the answers that Last Days delivers. Of course, the answers have a high cost—both physically, in the increasing number of amputations required of Kline, the detective at the heart of the mystery, and also spiritually, as Kline’s actions take him further away from what little about him remains human. Perhaps, in that sense, The Brotherhood of Mutilation suggested a wider range of options for Kline’s future, options that in Last Days are narrowed down to a single, horrific thread.

The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson
This was published as a novel, but I don’t believe it for a second. 120-some pages of big fonts and wide spacing, and I’m claiming this as a novella. And it’s better for the classification, I think. The Name of the World is a great book, I think, but it would be too slight if read as a traditional novel—the story here is too simple, and the resolution less than conclusive. Michael Reed, a one-time senatorial aide and current professor, is trapped by grief after his wife and daughter die, relying on the kindness of strangers to keep him from having to take any real action: “People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.” It takes a free-spirited performance artist/amateur stripper named Flower Cannon to break him out of his rut, and although that sounds like the worst possible plot imaginable, it’s done in a vague and magical way here, which keeps the book from being trite and allows it to come closer to accomplishing it’s own goals of revealing “the danger in hiding oneself away from the nauseating vastness of a conscious human life.”

I Am Death, or Bartleby the Monster (A Story of Chicago), by Gary Amdahl
The first novella in a collection of novellas, Amdahl’s I Am Death is reluctantly narrated by Jack, a Chicago journalist, who’s contacted by a mobster who wants Jack to write his biography. Unfortunately, the mobster takes after Melville’s Bartleby, in this case by preferring that his lawyer speak for him at every opportunity, preventing any real work from getting done. Jack and the lawyer, George Swanson, speak to each other in large, self-absorbed sentences, simultaneously self-aware enough to be grandiose while still being blind enough to miss the implications of their own words. At one point, Jack writes himself a note to remind himself that he is “going to pieces in a calm and methodical way,” while the lawyer compares himself to Al Jolson, saying, “Guy spends his whole life being someone else… They couldn’t be Jews so they put on blackface. See, this is George Swanson in mob face.” The novella sets up a great tension between the kind of people who compromise themselves to become successful (or even to have the chance of being successful) and those who cannot or will not, and so are destroyed by the everyday terror of their lives.

Kneller’s Happy Campers, by Etgar Keret
Like all of Keret’s best work, the concept here is fantastic: A world much like our own, only it’s an afterlife populated by nothing but suicides. So it’s kind of shitty there, and no one smiles, and our sad-sack narrator has to go on a road trip to find his ex-girlfriend, who’s also killed herself, only to get mixed up in a variety of angelic plots, messianic craziness, and the usual Etgar Keret mix of violence, confusion, and people trying to be sweet to each other but mostly failing. At one point, the narrator is so depressed he contemplates killing himself again, only to realize that if the punishment for killing yourself is this bad, the punishment for being dumb enough to do it twice must be even worse. Every time I think of that I can’t help but smile, even though I know it shouldn’t be funny. But in Keret’s hands, of course it is, because even though it’s a bad moment for the protagonist, you can almost feel Keret having to restrain his imagination from offing his character just so he could describe this new, worse double-suicide afterlife. It’s the longest thing Keret’s written that I know about, and while it’d probably be a short story if written by anyone else, it felt absolutely epic coming after a couple dozen of his two or three page stories.

Matt Bell is the author of two forthcoming chapbooks, How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press) and The Collectors (Caketrain), and his fiction has appeared or is upcoming in magazines such as Conjunctions, Meridian, Barrelhouse, Monkeybicycle, and Keyhole. Find him HERE.