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Great Short Novel 20. The Last Summer by Boris Pasternak (1934)
And so to our first Russian Great Short Novel, a country not short of masters of the form – look forward to future work from Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Lermontov to name but three. Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, wrote little other long prose fiction beside it and The Last Summer, and for almost all [...]
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Victoria by Hamsun is our first great short novel from Norway. Before the Scandinavian thriller boom that brought us Jo Nesbo, Knut Hamsun may well have been the best-known Norwegian author. And rather than conspiracies, murder and chase sequences Hamsun brought to mind for angst, gloom and even fellow-travelling with Nazi ideology. The truth is [...]
Henry James needs no introduction either as an author in general or a writer of great short novels in particular. As well as The Turn of The Screw, Daisy Miller will be on the site before long to name but one. I’ve started with The Turn of The Screw as, like Animal Farm, One Day [...]
James Baldwin’s second novel Giovanni’s Room sets aside dealing directly with the black experience to tackle another facet of this most complex of writers, homosexuality. It takes a cliched form of American literature: the unformed young man or woman in exile in Europe seeking enlightenment and experience in the more liberal and tolerant cities of [...]
Banana Yoshimoto, along with Haruko Murakami, is probably the best known contemporary Japanese author in the west. Kitchen is her first novel and remains one of her best-known. It is not a novel directly about cooking, though a lot of it does takes place in and around kitchens; the narrator gets a job as a [...]
Our second slice of Southern gothic (see The Awakening for the first) is a novella whose title is one of the most famous and resonant in American Literature. Titles, as Carson McCullers also gave us The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and Clock Without Hands, were clearly one of her [...]
The Book of Proper Names is an example of a short novel in translation: another thing I’d like to highlight on this blog. Those of us who read in English can be far too anglo-centric in our reading, and confine ourselves to novels from writers using English. Amelie Nothomb is one of the Francophone [...]
Part of the joy of writing this blog is sharing work from your favourite writers, of which Michel Faber is definitely one. This is not the most obvious place to start with Faber, and he’s perhaps an example of what could be termed an anti-Pynchon author. You might be best served by coming to this [...]
This is the first real ‘classic’ I’ve posted on here, as there is enough on 1984 or Alexander Denisovich elsewhere and this is a blog about short novels rather than classic novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favourite authors, so it wasn’t going to be long before a work of his appeared [...]
William Burroughs is one of those authors whose work is cited far more than read. Pioneer of the ‘cut-up’ text with Brion Gysin and the eldest member of the beats immortalised in Kerouac’s On The Road, his work is not for the faint-hearted. The ‘cut-up’ novels such as The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and [...]
Gunter Grass should be shelved with Pynchon as a novelist more bought and borrowed than read. Massive tomes such as Dog Years and The Flounder are forbidding in the extreme, and even his most famous work The Tin Drum is chiefly known through the superb film version. So all hail Cat and Mouse, a short [...]
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An ever-growing collection of the best great short novels from around the world, sampling literature at 150 pages per book.
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