There are a number of authors I’ve never read among the Art of the Novella crowd, and sometimes I wonder how good an introduction one of these books might be—perhaps The Girl With the Golden Eyes should not have been my first work by Balzac. You see, I’ve heard so many good things. And [...]
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Today I’ve chosen two more titles to revisit somewhat at random. I wanted to do the two Melville novellas, but I’ve been extremely busy and wanted to devote more time to them, so instead you get two (or at least 1.5) Irish writers. Dubliners is the only James Joyce I’ve read, and while [...] There are a number of titles in the Art of the Novella series that I expect to enjoy, that are by authors I like, that I’m sure I will be happy to have read. But there are a few I’ve been specifically looking forward to, and Heinrich von Kleist’s The Duel was one of [...] Mathilda is quite the little book. Written by Mary Shelley a year after Frankenstein, it was never published in her lifetime. And while the father-daughter incest element isn’t exactly explicit, it’s certainly subversive and pretty wild. The novella opens similarly to The Lifted Veil: the narrator, assuring us that she is close to death, [...] May Day is officially the first book in the Art of the Novella series I have disliked. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I’m also probably the only person ever who didn’t like The Great Gatsby (which I should re-read) and have thus never counted myself a Fitzgerald fan. To begin with, I often [...] I am in no way immune to the charms of Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance by Sholem Aleichem, but, like The Country of the Pointed Firs, it seems to me one of the lighter of the Art of the Novella series, and similarly “regional.” I’m also not one to disdain regional literature—I like it—but I [...] Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs is the kind of writing I have a deep ambivalence about. On one side, I genuinely enjoy reading such aware, thoughtful observations of and interactions with a region and its people, and this exploration of the small coastal community of Dunnet’s Landing is firmly within [...] Just one of the wonderful things about the Art of the Novella challenge is that I had been loving, buying, and reading these babies (yes, in that order) long before Frances threw down her gauntlet, and with the addition of titles I read in other editions (oh, Friday humor), I have plenty of material [...] One of my great humiliations is that I have not yet read Don Quixote, or, until now, any Cervantes at all. A tragedy! Especially because his Dialogue of the Dogs, first published in 1613, is perfectly delicious. The dialogue is preceded by “The Deceitful Marriage,” the story of a poor soldier who has been [...] George Eliot’s 1859 novella The Lifted Veil has, like Amos Barton before it, renewed my interest in getting back into Eliot’s long works—though hopefully it won’t be another two years before I finally move on that. Here, the themes are among my favorites: the problems of sympathy and understanding other people. The narrator, Latimer, [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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