“Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers,” begins the jacket copy on each edition of Melville House’s “The Art of the Novella” collection. It’s true: despite the pretty name (say it out loud: “no-vell-a”), novellas are a chronically ignored form of literature. Many of the thirty slim novellas released by Melville House are available for the first time in book form, which is surprising considering that the authors include Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Cervantes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Balzac and Leo Tolstoy.
But then, novellas are sort of like the tweens of the literary world: potentially flighty, awkwardly positioned, easy to underrate. Luckily, the publisher has culled stellar examples of the form and printed them up with minimalist covers available in color schemes that range from “1960s rec room” to rainbow sherbet. Each one is thin enough to fit in a coat pocket but fat enough to provide more than a few hours of reading. The volumes make design objects as satisfying as they do reads, and that’s saying a lot.
Two of the best are written by Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno. The former novella, written in 1853, tells the tale of Bartleby (whom The New Yorker referred to as “the proto slacker”), a man who works assisting wealthy men with their business on Wall Street until he decides, one day, that he’d rather not work, or do much of anything. Benito Cereno was written two years later and focuses on the true-life story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish merchant ship in the late 18th century. If you’ve been meaning to read Moby-Dick forever—and who among us isn’t?—this pair of novellas would be the perfect appetizer to nibble on while you build up the necessary appetite for that epic. Happy reading!
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Chronically ignored!? Pssh.