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
"You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"Exemplifying Henry James's famous belief that "Art makes life," The Lesson of the Master is a piercing study of the life that art makes. When the tale's protagonist—a gifted young writer—meets and befriends a famous author he has long idolized, he is both repelled by and attracted to the artist's great secret: the emotional costs of a life dedicated to art.
With extraordinary psychological insight and devastating wit, the novella asks the question of whether art is, ultimately, demeaning or ennobling for the artist, while capturing the ambiguities of a life devoted to art, and the choices artists must make. The expatriate James knew these choice well by the time he published the novella in the Universal Review in 1888, and the work reveals him at the height of his powers.
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
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, the son of theologian Henry James, Sr., and brother of philosopher William James. He entered Harvard Law School at nineteen but soon quit to write and travel in Europe – to Paris, for example, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot, and Zola. Settling in London in 1876, he gained international fame with Daisy Miller, which scandalized Victorian society and sold thousands of copies. Never again would he equal its popularity, but his increasingly sophisticated and meticulously observed works, such as
The Golden Bowl and
The Ambassadors, established him as the first master of psychological fiction. He died in England in 1916.
His novella, The Coxon Fund, is also a part of The Art Of The Novella series.