Synopses & Reviews
The Art of The NovellaToo 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
Synopsis
"What has cast such a shadow upon you?""The Negro."
With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early best-selling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.
Based on a real life incident—the character names remain unchanged—Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville's most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santo Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?), and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities.
It is, in short, a multi-layered masterpiece that rewards repeated readings, and deepens our appreciation of Melville's genius.
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.
Synopsis
This harrowing account of a slave revolt is one of Melville's finest tales. When a New England sea captain goes to aid a mysterious ship, it slowly unfolds, in almost surreal clarity, that it is a slave ship whose cargo has revolted, its captain is a prisoner and most of the crew has been murdered.
Synopsis
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.
With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early best-selling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.
Based on a real life incident--the character names remain unchanged--Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville's most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santo Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?), and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities.
It is, in short, a multi-layered masterpiece that rewards repeated readings, and deepens our appreciation of Melville's genius.
About the Author
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. At 18 he set sail on a whaler, and upon his return, wrote a series of bestselling adventure novels based on his travels, including Typee and Omoo, which made him famous. Starting with Moby Dick in 1851, however, his increasingly complex and challenging work drew more and more negative criticism, until 1857 when, after his collection Piazza Tales (which included "Bartleby the Scrivener"), and the novel The Confidence Man, Melville stopped publishing fiction. He drifted into obscurity, writing poetry and working for the Customs House in New York City, until his death in 1891.