Recommend great novellas here

Inspired by the movie v. book thread and mention of sub-150pg life-changers.

The Pilgrim Falcon (a love story)

uh The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway Wescott

The Invention of Morel, a 1940 alt reality novella by Bioy Casares. ""To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole", sez Borges.

Katherine Ann Porter - Noon Wine
Thomas Mann - Tonio Kroger and Death in Venice
Robert Musil - Young Torless
Turgenev - First Love

Joyce's The Dead

Charles G Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao

The End of the Road - John Barth

miss lonelyhearts nathanael west

The Driver's Seat- Muriel Spark

ILX favorite Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers is pretty short and probably counts. Maybe it is mentioned on that movie vs. book thread.

Also seconding Invention Of Morel.

I didn't know it was an ilx favorite. A little piece of ilx history I just learned.

Conrad - Heart of Darkness - my favourite novel, full-stop
Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Henry James - The Turn of the Screw & The Beast in the Jungle
Joyce Carol Oates - Black Water

I'd say Traumnovelle but it sucked ass.

Durrenmatt - The Pledge

charlotte perkins gilman - the yellow wallpaper
edwin abbott - flatland

was about to cap'n obviously recommend 'the crying of lot 49' but see that it's described as a novel. huh. feels short by the prolix standards of the pinch.

saul bellow - carpe diem

"the blessed nouvelle" (henry james)

- the aspern papers
- lady barberina
- an international episode

edith wharton - 'ethan frome'

seconding 'the driver's seat'; my favourite novella book on this thread

The Yellow Wallpaper - amazing, but isn't it a short story rather than a novella?

Anyway, it's reprinted in this book, which is my favourite short fiction anthology, includes Edith Wharton's brilliant two-pager, The Valley of Childish Things, and merits plugging at every opportunity:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Daughters-Decadence-Writers-Fin-siecle/dp/185381590X

cap'n obvious says Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Cap'n even more obvious says The Gambler and Notes from the Underground.
RL Stevenson too: Jekyll/Hyde for one.
(2nded: Heart of Darkness, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Dead, Invention of Morel. Must read The Driver's Seat)

kafka's the metamorphosis

and guy de maupassant's "le horla"

Indian Nocturne - Antonio Tabucchi

Flaubert: Un Coeur Simple/A Simple Heart

Is The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain long enough to qualify? how about Melville's Bartleby?

Repped for Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich Von Kleist somewhere on another thread. I think it's novella length. So great.

Three novella sized tales of obsession/destruction/passion and love of language.

Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Yasunari Kawabata - The Beauty and Sadness

Too Loud a Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal

Marguerite Duras - The Malady of Death

shorter than most short stories, but feels vaster than most full size novels, favorite Duras in a close race

death of ivan ilich - tolstoy
poor folk - dostoevsky

thomas bernhard - concrete
robert walser - everything he wrote is great

and many many more...

Thanks all for great recs, but I'm a gonna go read all these and if these don't change my life there's gonna be hell to pay!

The Old Forest by Peter Taylor.

Graham Greene: The Third Man. Lots of his books are slim but are definitely novels, but I say this one's a novella at least partly because we did it at school.

Oh, and Philip Roth's Everyman.

does Note From Underground count? It's pretty short. How about The Stranger?

If some of these are novellas (which I don't think they are really and this is just a thread about short-ish novels) then I'm recommending Breton's Nadja and I suppose Camus' The Fall cos they good.

"A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel" Wikipedia is no help. Does anyone have a better definition? "Canadian author George Fetherling said that to reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like "saying a pony is a baby horse."

Wikipedia does have a handy list though. 'Animal Farm' may genuinely be a life-changer.

I think any attempt to get a solid consensus definition would be doomed to failure. I'd only tend to use the word to describe something between about 50 and 100 pages, a lot of the books listed here are over or under that mark. I think the bottom line is that some works end up having novella stick as a tag whereas others almost always get called novels.

well, that wikipedia pages says 20,000-40,000 words. Don't know how long that generally is in pages though. Though, yeah, 50-100 pages seems about right, maybe up to 110 or 120.

Would also recommend "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroine's' by John Crowley, that shit is devastating.

I'm struggling to remember if any of the internal stories in Don Quixote or The Manuscript found in Saragossa (need to re-read this, I can barely remember it) are long enough to be novellas, or if there are any great novellas wrapped up in larger novels.

A lot of the short novels I have are double-spaced, which must be cheating.

lol, you might as well read long books since you've got enough to get through with this lot

Steven Millhauser has some good Novella's too.

I suppose Camus' The Fall

Just reread this. Excellent stuff.

For all it's simplicity of language I can't think of a book that's more rewarding but elusive in its ideas than The Fall.

good thread. i never seem to read novellas even though i dread long books.

My present display name is a quote...

(From La Chute)

Hahaha so it is and I hadn't noticed.

The Iron Man - Ted Hughes (technically a kids' book but I think it qualifies as a novella too).
At the Bay - Katherine Mansfield

Balzac's Colonel Chabert

Self-plug here: I used to write about novellas for Bookslut ( http://www.bookslut.com/Small%20but%20Perfectly%20Formed.php ) until I realised that the editor didn't give a fuck about her contributors.

I'm struggling to remember if any of the internal stories in Don Quixote or The Manuscript found in Saragossa (need to re-read this, I can barely remember it) are long enough to be novellas

'La novela del curioso impertinente', with Anselmo & Lotario, goes on for nearly fifty pages in my edition of DQ.

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~ladamic/pics/sommer.jpg

This is also one of my favorites. Hard to find, so pick up a copy if you ever come across one.

oh i read "the pigeon" (and "perfume" obv. which isn't a novella) and it is great

Pnin by Nabokov

v. amusing

i love pnin but it's a novel

he has some good novellas though - the eye, transparent things

what i'd like to find is a warm novelette.

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/6628/208blognormal.jpg

Some of these are definitely novels.

I don't normally dig list threads, but this one I like.

salinger - raise high the roofbeams, carpenters is my favorite thing that he did

miss lonelyhearts nathanael west

― kamerad, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 10:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

YESSSSSSSSSS.

One of my all-time favorite reads.

Conrad has a bunch of novellas that are less o_O than Heart of Darkness, like The Secret Sharer and Youth.

Also, Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

Most of Jim Thompson's novels are short enough to be considered novellas, if you're going by word count.

Balzac's Colonel Chabert

― Randy will be autographing copies of his fascinating autobiography (dyao), Wednesday, September 16, 2009 8:30 PM (1 month ago)

^^^

Ethan Canin - Batorsag and Szerelem is my absolute favourite.

also:

Melville's "Bartelby the Scrivener"
Dostoyevski's "Notes from Underground"
Salinger's "Zooey"