My essay “Call Me Fish-Owl: Reflecting on the Novella’s neither Fish nor Fowl Status” and the compendium “Those Little Monsters: Recommended Novellas” opened up a dialogue about the novella and about great fiction in general. Since the original post I invited a few other writers, editors, and publishers (Gary Amdahl, Andrew Borgstrom, John Domini, Conor Madigan, Kyle Minor, Ander Monson, Greg Gerke, Paul Kincaid, Deb Olin Unferth, Derek White, Dan Wickett, Andrew Zornoza, to weigh in with their own lists and comments. It’s resulted in new thoughts about some of the usual suspects, but also about many other books that made never made it on the original list.
In an email to me, Andrew Zornoza wrote a wonderful meditation on the novella:
The pleasure I get out of a short story arrives in that moment when the book is put down. The world changed ever so slightly, the mind spinning lazily like a bicycle tire before a thunderstorm (if one pictures, like I do, an abandoned bicycle propped up on a cinder block, the seat leaning against an old farmhouse). With a novel, the pleasure is in the entering not the exit. It is that moment of someone lifting you up and swinging you across a chasm—prolonged. It is a universe entire, apart from our own. The novella has neither, or both, of these characteristics. Its strength lies in anomaly.
The novella is the freest of forms because it chooses itself. An author does not set out to write a novella. The story says: I will end here, I am this way, now go find a publisher. . . .
Why? The short story confronts the end before it even begins: within a handful of pages it must gather its weight and then fall of its own accord into the spooling reel of the reader’s memory. The novelist flings any promise of an ending far into the future and it’s not until a certain body count—a certain mass—has been reached that the conclusion can be seen (though occasionally, like Christopher Priest’s towed city in “Inverted World,” the words are just hauled further and further toward a continually receding horizon—see Proust, Pynchon, Bolaño’s 2666, and other rectangular doorstops containing infinities). The novella unfolds past the point at which we can absorb in one sitting, but neither does it devour territory and clamor to live upon a nightstand. And the latter to me is the biggest distinction. A novella is a tattered manuscript; it is not born with the idea of being put between two pieces of heavy card-stock and plastered with photographs, advance praise, the author’s name and a twelve digit number from the Library of Congress. Neither its size nor brevity appeal to the publishing world; it answers to nothing but the fickle cult of the devoted reader. Perhaps that is why so many of those below [hyperlink to his list] are sadly difficult to acquire.
I crossed some genre lines with this list. But here I side with Christopher Higgs and define the novella as simply “a short book.” Length is not an arbitrary distinction, what we think of as fiction, philosophy, non-fiction, manifesto is so. . . .
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 