JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

A top ten list? That’s a lot of novellas. Also, what’s a novella? I’d say, in no order … The Aspern Papers, by H. James, Death in Venice, by T. Mann, Chekhov certainly (Lady with a Lapdog), Jesus’ Son is a kind of novella, as is The White Album (non-fiction novella) and there’s always Billy Budd, and I’m trying to think of something modern. Stanley Elkin and Samuel Beckett (some of the early stories like First Love) and The Dead by Joyce, that’s about ten. And John Berger, Pig Earth or Once in Europa, they’re short enough, and that’s it.

John Haskell is the author of the novel American Purgatorio and the short story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock (both from FSG). He is a contributor to the radio programs The Next Big Thing and Studio 360. His forthcoming novel is Out of My Skin. Find him HERE.

I probably haven’t read 10 novellas in my life, but I would be happy if I could write one half as good as either of Nathanael West’s classics: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of Locust. Brutal, funny, and mind-blowingly modern (or, perhaps, post-modern), these grotesques seem perfectly contained by their middling, impractical length.

Absurdity runs best at short distances, it seems, and stories tend to become more naturalistic as they get longer, provided they remain readable. West had a perfect sense for how far his conceits could go. From Tod Hackett watching ”the scarlet infantry of England” pass by his Hollywood office in the opening paragraphs of The Day of the Locust to the persistent deployment of the protagonist’s nom de pity in Miss Lonelyhearts, West stands midway between Saki and George Saunders in the history of compact, pitiless satire. (The section headings in Miss Lonelyhearts seem lifted directly from the former’s Reginald tales, in fact.)

Of course, West didn’t have much success in his lifetime, and you have to wonder if it wasn’t because he chose (or was compelled by his particular skill-set) to write at such a useless length. (His two other, justifiably overlooked works—The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million—are also skimpy exercises.) But then the distinction between novel and novella is about technology and commerce rather than dramatic necessity anyway. While all of West’s works were originally issued in stand-alone volumes, it takes two of them to fill out a Modern Library edition—to make an adequately-sized object commonly referred to as a book. (The Library of America’s standards for bookiness are even more extensive, requiring all four of West’s works.) Now, with the (final?) arrival of the ebook revolution, one wonders two things. First, would West’s fortunes have been better today? And second, what form will fiction be allowed to take once it’s freed from the technological and commercial restraints of bookiness?

Not long ago, one hour seemed like the perfect increment in which to deliver a crime drama, after all, and it only took VOD, DVDs, and Netflix to show us that 60 hours could work just as well.

Jim Hanas is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Slate, Radar, PRINT, Communication Arts, Advertising Age, the New York Daily News, GQ, Salon, the Village Voice, etc. His stories have appeared in Fence, McSweeney’s, One Story, Bridge, and Twelve Stories, etc. Find him HERE and HERE.

In making this list, I realized that I made the transition from Little House on the Prairie to the wild world of literature thanks to novellas. I remember the bookshelf at my parents’ house as shelves of engineering textbooks and art textbooks mixed in with a tantalizing few thin books stuck between them. With this formative kind of stuff in mind, and given the thought of pitting James Joyce against Voltaire in a “favorites” list makes me break out in hives, I’ll order my list chronologically from when I first discovered these books.

Animal Farm (1945), by George Orwell
Animal Farm was one of the books I would sneak into church and read in the balcony when I was supposed to be operating the sound equipment for the choir. I read this book and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea hiding underneath the sound board. I was about ten and didn’t get the satire thing, but I thought it was wild that adults could get away with writing books for other adults where absurd and fantastic things happened. This would prove to be formative, though I never did go back to the book.

Trout Fishing in America (1967), by Richard Brautigan
How wild to find Trout Fishing in America on the big bookshelf. In my memory this happened almost right after I read Animal Farm. I’ve always liked the way he used the phrase “my woman” in the book: “My woman trailed silently behind, carrying the rods and the fish.”

Candide (1759), by Voltaire
Throw another satire on the list. I love Candide for the journey, the way the red sheep are lost on their way out of El Dorado. Dan Rhodes says, and I think this sounds about right, “Reading a book as hilarious and intelligent as this, it’s baffling to think that even now the use of humour in fiction is routinely mistaken for a lack of seriousness.”

The Awakening (1899), by Kate Chopin
Teenage years are the perfect time to read about discovering the wild and terrible world, particularly if all that discovery is set at the beach and one can daydream about owning a seaside manor even though one lives in the desert. Sure, The Awakening dates itself; it’s romantic and a little goofy. But I’d love to see anyone write the melodrama of the last paragraph simply and evenly, and without at least considering either a hum of bees or a musky odor of pinks. Chopin did it best.

Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad
When it comes to teaching literature, Heart of Darkness is simultaneously perfect and terrible as a text. It’s such a beautiful book, but since teachers can’t just sit around and point out the sublime like metaphorical tour guides, it becomes an example of a frame story and an unreliable narrator and the whole thing just deflates. I wish teachers—particularly teachers of literature—felt comfortable acting like tour guides. If they did, people might read as much as they went to Disneyland.

The Metamorphosis (1915), by Franz Kafka & The Breast (1972), by Philip Roth
Though they’re each singular achievements, of course, I have to mention these two on the same line because I will never be able to talk about one without the other. Even Roth gives a shout-out to Kafka in his novella about a man who, over the course of some weeks, transforms into a 155-pound breast. Roth is a recommended read for anyone who wants to read or write erotica or absurdist literature, or anyone who enjoys breasts and wants to simultaneously revel in and challenge the idea of that enjoyment.

The Dead (1914), by James Joyce
I’m pretty sure that the last paragraph of The Dead is the most perfect paragraph in the English language. I once copied the text by hand just to see how it felt to write it. It felt really good.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby
This is the last novella I’ve read and also one of my favorites, if only to consider the effort that went into every letter and word on every page. The act of writing it (Bauby had locked-in syndrome after a stroke, which meant that “writing” the book required a complicated process involving a nurse and his left eyelid) resulted in a breathtaking spare and careful prose.

Amelia Gray is a lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at Austin Community College. Her writing has appeared in The Onion, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, and Caketrain, among others. Her work has been chosen as the finalist for McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Contest and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Contest. Her book AM/PM was just released by Featherproof Books. Find her HERE.