The Dialogue of the Dogs (Art of the Novella)

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. The Art of the Novella collection celebrates this renegade art form and it’s most illustrious practitioners with 42 of the most famous novellas ever published. 

“Elegant-looking paperback editions…a good read in a small package.”

—The Wall Street Journal

The Art of the Novella collection includes one each of the following titles:

A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert

A Sleep and a Forgetting by William Dean Howells

Adolphe by Benjamin Constant

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

The Beach at Falesa by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

The Coxon Fund by Henry James

The Dead by James Joyce

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The Devil by Leo Tolstoy

The Dialogues of the Dogs by Miguel de Cervantes

The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky

First Love by Ivan Turgenev

Freya of the Seven Isles by Joseph Conrad

The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

How the Two Ivans Quarrelled by Nikolai Gogal

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust

The Lesson of the Master by Henry James

The Lifted Veil by George Eliot

The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain

The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling

Mathilda by Mary Shelley

May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Michael Kohlass by Heinrich Von Kleist

My Life by Anton Chekhov

The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson

Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance by Sholem Aleichem

Tales of Belkin by Alexander Pushkin

The Touchstone by Edith Warton

The Duel by Giacomo Casanova

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

The Duel by Anton Chekhov

The Duel by Heinrich Von Kleist

The Duel by Aleksandr Kuprin

“I wanted them all, even those I’d already read.”

—Ron Rosenbaum

The first talking-dog story in Western literature—from the writer generally acknowledged, alongside William Shakespeare, as the founding father of modern literature, no less?

Indeed, The Dialogue of the Dogs features, in a condensed, powerful version, all the traits the author of Don Quixote is famous for: It's a picaresque rich in bawdy humor, social satire, and fantasy, and it uses story tactics that were innovative at the time, such as the philandering husband who, given syphilis by his wife, is hospitalized. Late one feverish night he overhears the hospital's guard dogs telling each other their life's story—a wickedly ironic tale within the tale within the tale, wherein the two virtuous canines find themselves victim, time and again, to deceitful, corrupt humanity.

Here in a sparkling new translation, the parody of a Greek dialogue is so entertaining it belies the stunningly prescient sophistication of this novella—that it is a story about telling stories, and about creating a new way to discuss morality that isn't rooted in empiricism. In short, it's a masterful work that flies in the face of the forms and ethics of its time...and perhaps ours as well.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.