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
In a tale even wilder than his "Don Quixote," this gloriously inventive picaresque is complete with deceived husbands, alchemists, comedians and the brilliant, satiric "Dialog of the Dogs"-a Socratic "dialog" held between two talking dogs. With vigorous wit, scathing satire and comic irony, Cervantes depicts life in all its moral ambiguity.
Synopsis
"Ever since I could chase a bone, I've longed to talk...."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.
About the Author
Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain in 1547, the son of an impoverished barber-surgeon who may have been a minor noble—or posed as one. Little is known of Cervantes' life until, at 23, he went to Italy—by some accounts, fleeing justice after a duel—to join Spain's war against the Ottoman Empire, losing his left arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Sailing home, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers. Eventually ransomed by his family, he returned home in 1580 deeply in debt to his rescuers. He published an unsuccessful novel, La Galatea, married a woman twenty years his junior and, denied permission to emigrate to the New World, became a tax collector. Subsequently, he was imprisoned at least twice for account "irregularities". During one of those imprisonments—in LaMancha—he conceived the satire of chivalry that became his masterwork, Don Quixote. It gained widespread popularity and notoriety for its unprecedented use of vernacular Spanish, and for defying the tenets of the long dominant romantic genre. His subsequent collection, Exemplary Novellas, gained even greater acclaim in 1613. Success allowed him to retire to Madrid to write, and he completed a final novel, The Exploits of Persiles and Sigismunda three days before he died on April 23, 1616—the same day as William Shakespeare.