Lists and Lists of Novellas

No term says ‘arbitrary’ like ‘novella’ does.  Nevertheless, John Madera did a useful thing by asking more than sixty writers and editors to list their ten favorite novellas, and, most interestingly, explain their decisions. John has written a really compelling blog post about his thoughts on little long works after reading through these lists. He’s also posted all the lists.

Here’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. After reading some of the other lists there are several more fundamentally moving novellas that I forgot about, but it’s safe to say that all 10 of these affect me in profound ways. I’m not sure if it’s due to John’s sample, but I found it interesting what a small presence comics have on these lists. I don’t know if it involves  the labor of creation that goes into comics, but it’s a form that really seems to hit its stride most often at the novella length.

And here’s a discussion of the lists over on HTML Giant.

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2 comments

 No.1 
John Madera:

It’s a interesting concern you raise about comics. I too wonder where they fit in. Comics and the graphic novel (are there graphic novellas?) is worthy of its own exploration. And it sets me to wondering why my own reading of them has diminished over the years. As a teen, I was an avid reader of Frank Miller and Alan Moore and loved anything that Bill Sienkiewicz painted. I have two thousand comics or so languishing in an acid-free box in a closet somewhere in the house.

April 12th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
 No.2 
John Dermot Woods:

Wow, John – you need to break that box out. You might be surprised what it’s like reading those books again. Could be a pretty amazing experience.

‘Graphic novel’ is largely a term of marketing (which ‘novella’ probably is too), but I would say that most of the books that are sold as graphic novels really have more of the presence and bearing of novellas (especially considering Blake Butler’s comment on HTML Giant about the definition of a novella being independent of length). The comics medium seems particularly suited to that idea of quickness, in Calvino’s sense of the word, that is so central to those works that we call novellas.

Check out Dash Shaw’s Body World for a beautiful example of an online novella. Another interesting example is his book Bottomless Belly Button which at 700+ pages sits like a brick on your bookshelf, but certainly reads with the quickness and containment of a novella. (While a shorter book like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is undoubtedly a novel.)

April 14th, 2009 at 8:02 am

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