While pulling together our winter issue, in which we highlight the novella, I’ve been in a variety of settings where I’ve been asked to explain exactly what a novella is. Over several months of researching and gathering titles, keeping a running list of classic novellas, writing about novellas, editing people writing about novellas, reclassifying some short novels as novellas and changing them back again—never once did I pause to ask myself that very same question. And yet, when asked, I always had an answer.
Posts Tagged ‘Issue 3’
Issue #3, Winter 2010: The Novella Issue
Issue #3, Winter 2010
“The Novella Issue”
Tiphanie Yanique
An interview with Tiphanie Yanique, by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Interviewed by Kaitlyn Greenridge
Tiphanie Yanique’s debut short story collection, “How to Escape From a Leper Colony” was released in March 2010 by Graywolf Press. The National Book Award Foundation recently named her one of the “5 under 35 Emerging Writers.” In addition, she was nominated for the 2010 Cork City Frank O’Conner Short Story awards and her book was nominated to the Boston Globe’s “Sixteen Authors to Watch.” She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.
What to Read When the Revolution Begins
A review of The Union Jack by Imre Kertész
There’s something special about the novella form. Long enough to bind—too many pages to staple, words enough to merit book length without resorting to margin tricks—but short enough to read in a sitting, with breaks for coffee, underlining, pencil-sharpening, maybe lunch. Melville House publishes a series of backlist novellas—the classics, Turgenev and Eliot and Shelley and Proust—and a line of contemporaries, many appearing in English for the first time, all bound in eye-catching glossy covers the titles in a font so big you can be sure everyone in your subway car will notice your discerning taste. So here’s this, one of the latest from their contemporary line: The Union Jack, Melville House’s second offering from Imre Kertész, the Hungarian writer and translator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.
The New Normal
A review of The New Valley by Josh Weil
In Josh Weil’s The New Valley, a collection of three novellas, we meet three solitary men, each in their own unique fog of grief. The rural Virginia they have always known is transforming around them, dreamlike. The most reliable of landmarks, the rivers and farms and gas stations, come to symbolize something new—the desire to be seen, the fear of being dispensable. The characters and their environment are interdependent; they change each other. In this and other ways, Weil’s work echoes Winesburg, Ohio. It is a landscape where the hills are both prison walls and great vistas, where one must go to extremes (like joining the recurring commune) to be touched, and where people are so spread out no one would hear their echo if they screamed—which they never would.
A Death Manifesto
A review of C by Tom McCarthy
On the 14th of November, 1999, a curious advertisement appeared in the London Times next to a story about a Monaco based financier. After close scrutiny the reader could surmise that the advertisement was actually a declaration from the “First Committee” of an institution calling itself the International Necronautical Society, or the INS. Nobody had heard of it, since the INS was a just-launched semi-fictitious organization with a strange objective—what might be best summarized as a death manifesto. Holding the important title of “General Secretary” was an INS member by the name of Tom McCarthy.
Journey to the Center of a Character
A review of Brains by Tony Tulathimutte
Tony Tulathimutte’s Brains—winner of the Malahat Review’s annual novella contest—is a great story by a talented writer, despite the unappealing title.
At first readers might be put off by the somewhat affected, if self-assured, narration that introduces the main character, Diana, a child prodigy who becomes the unpopular valedictorian of her high school class at the age of fourteen. Though Tulathimutte’s formal diction keeps the reader at arms length, it aptly reflects the condescension and emotional distance of our brainy, friendless, perhaps even asexual protagonist, who sees herself as separate from the rest of her species:
A Grandmother like No Other
A review of From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus
At the heart of Milena Agus’ beautiful, crystalline novella, From the Land of the Moon, lies a question of truth. What is the truth behind any “true” story? When we look back on the events of our lives and create stories by telling them to others, how much can possibly be true? If my sister’s memory differs from mine, even drastically, is one of us necessarily lying? Or did we each simply experience the event differently? If my sister then appears crazy to me, is she crazy? Or am I failing to understand her and her worldview? Is truth the same as accuracy?
Cod, God and Most Things In-Between
A review of Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa
Anthony De Sa’s first book, a collection of linked short stories, came out in Canada to critical acclaim, was short listed for the 2008 Giller Prize and the City of Toronto Book Award, and won the Premios Talento Prize in Portugal in 2009. This Archipelago Books’ release marks the arrival of this new Portuguese-Canadian writer’s work in America.