The Art of the Short Novel

1

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A bitter, isolated civil servant in St. Petersburg delivers a monologue attacking rational egoism and utopian idealism. Considered one of the first existentialist works in world literature.

1864 Russia

2

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy

A high-court judge in 19th-century Russia falls terminally ill and is forced to confront the emptiness of his outwardly successful life. Considered one of the greatest novellas ever written, it distils Tolstoy's moral philosophy into 90 pages.

1886 Russia

3

The Stranger

Albert Camus

Meursault, a French Algerian, kills an Arab on a beach and faces trial — less for the murder than for his failure to weep at his mother's funeral. Camus's most celebrated novel, it introduced absurdism to a wide readership.

1942 France

4

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

A group of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a wartime evacuation attempt to govern themselves — and descend into savagery. A disturbing allegory of the inherent darkness in human nature.

1954 United Kingdom

5

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

An aging Cuban fisherman struggles alone at sea with a giant marlin for three days, only to have it devoured by sharks on the way back to shore. The novella won the Pulitzer Prize and is widely cited as a factor in Hemingway's Nobel Prize.

1952 United States

6

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

Two itinerant ranch workers in California — the sharp George and the simple, powerful Lennie — share a dream of owning their own land. A spare, tragic novella about friendship, loneliness, and the crushing of dreams.

1937 United States

7

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

Juan Preciado travels to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father Pedro Páramo, only to discover it populated entirely by the dead. This 112-page novel, once rejected by two publishers, became one of the most influential in Latin American literature.

1955 Mexico

8

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

Travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a giant insect. His family's reaction — from shock to resentment to relief at his death — makes the novella a devastating study of alienation within the family unit.

1915 Czech Republic

9

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann

A celebrated German writer travels to Venice for rest and becomes obsessed with the beauty of a Polish boy, Tadzio, even as cholera sweeps through the city. One of the most formally perfect novellas in German literature.

1912 Germany

10

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

An unnamed, starving writer wanders the streets of Kristiania (Oslo), refusing charity and descending into hunger-induced hallucinations. Hamsun's debut novel is a pioneering work of psychological modernism.

1890 Norway