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
A new translation of one of the most revered and exquisite novellas ever written: After a simple accident at home, a middle-aged man gradually realizes he's dying. But is it too late to realize life's meaning?
Leo Tolstoyis the author of numerous novels, stories, and polemics, including War and Peaceand Anna Karenina.
Synopsis
There is no explanation.Written eight years after the publication of Anna Karenina—a time during which, despite the global success of his novels, Leo Tolstoy renounced fiction in favor of religious and philosophical tracts—The Death of Ivan Ilych represents perhaps the most keenly realized melding of Tolstoy’s spirituality with his artistic skills.
Here in a vibrant new translation, the tale of a judge who slowly comes to understand that his illness is fatal was inspired by Tolstoy’s observation at his local train station of hundreds of shackled prisoners being sent off to Siberia, many for petty crimes. When he learned that the sentencing judge had died, Tolstoy was roused to consider the judge’s thoughts during his final days—a study on the acceptance of mortality only deepened by the death, during its writing, of one of Tolstoy’s own young children.
The final result is a magisterial story, both chilling and beguiling in the fullness of its empathy, its quotidian detail, and the beauty of its prose, and is, as many have claimed it to be, one of the most moving novellas ever written.
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
"Small wonders"
Time Out London
"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer
About the Author
Leo Tolstoy was born into the upper levels of the Russian aristocracy (his mother was a princess) in 1828. After a licentious youth, he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War, and published his first novel,
Childhood, while serving in an artillery unit. After participating in some of the deadliest battles of the century, such as the Siege of Sebastopol, he quit the military in disgust. But the experience proved the inspiration for some of his greatest writing, including
Sebastopol Sketches and
War and Peace. After the war, he traveled throughout Europe but was disillusioned by Western materialism and returned to his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. There, he married, fathered 13 children, founded a school for young peasants, and wrote
Anna Karenina. But in 1879 Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis, and denounced the Orthodox church, private property, and the demands of the flesh. His extreme asceticism inspired a widespread, cult-like worship, but it also exacerbated a decades-long tension with his wife, Sofia. In 1910, after an argument with her, he fled the estate, only to die shortly thereafter at the nearby railroad station.
Ian Dreiblatt translates from the Russian, Latin, Yiddish, and Amharic. His previous work includes translations of Mandelstam, Dragomoshchenko, and Catullus.