2008 Woodie Awards
A novella is perfect for the busy student
Michele Brittany
Issue date: 5/5/05 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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I was in a bookstore recently looking for something good to read. Never mind that I have over 400 books at home (I collect first editions) and have several readings to complete for my classes, but I was looking for a book to whisk me off to some foreign destination with characters I have not met before.
In the literature section, I came across Leo Tolstoy, and since I have just returned from Russia, I scrutinized the titles. Several copies of War and Peace weighed the bookshelf down. Nope, I already a copy of that and besides, I was saving that for summer.
Amongst those looming copies, I saw a slim, short white binding with the blunt Tolstoy title of The Devil. Now, that piqued my interest and I pulled the book out from its hiding place.
The book was a part of a series called The Art of the Novella. I had heard of the novella before, and remembered it was shorter than a novel, but longer than something else. It was a mere 100 pages. After looking around for every title of the series on the shelves, The Devil went home with me.
Okay, so I have a bunch of reading for school, but this little book found its way to the top of the heap and I savored each page like I would a glass of shiraz. It was a fantastic story and it was a way of escaping from the heavy academic reading for a short time.
"Novellas are a hybrid form, neither short stories nor novels," Dr. Philip Heldrich informed me when I asked about them. "The novella seems to me closer to the short story than the novel form, particularly with respect to Edgar Allan Poe's classic definition of the short story; the short can be read in one sitting, often has a singular focus, and has a noticeable unity of effect."
Contrary to being short in length, the novella actually has a very long history, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century in Italy with Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, written in 1353. It was a novelle (plural for novella) containing ten stories by ten people who fled the Black Death five years earlier.
It wasn't until the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century that the novella evolved into its own format with the particular structure of length that is familiar in contemporary times.
In the literature section, I came across Leo Tolstoy, and since I have just returned from Russia, I scrutinized the titles. Several copies of War and Peace weighed the bookshelf down. Nope, I already a copy of that and besides, I was saving that for summer.
Amongst those looming copies, I saw a slim, short white binding with the blunt Tolstoy title of The Devil. Now, that piqued my interest and I pulled the book out from its hiding place.
The book was a part of a series called The Art of the Novella. I had heard of the novella before, and remembered it was shorter than a novel, but longer than something else. It was a mere 100 pages. After looking around for every title of the series on the shelves, The Devil went home with me.
Okay, so I have a bunch of reading for school, but this little book found its way to the top of the heap and I savored each page like I would a glass of shiraz. It was a fantastic story and it was a way of escaping from the heavy academic reading for a short time.
"Novellas are a hybrid form, neither short stories nor novels," Dr. Philip Heldrich informed me when I asked about them. "The novella seems to me closer to the short story than the novel form, particularly with respect to Edgar Allan Poe's classic definition of the short story; the short can be read in one sitting, often has a singular focus, and has a noticeable unity of effect."
 Media Credit: Michele Brittany A gem of a novella, The Devil by Leo Tolstoy, is one of many fine examples of this little known literary genre today. |
Contrary to being short in length, the novella actually has a very long history, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century in Italy with Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, written in 1353. It was a novelle (plural for novella) containing ten stories by ten people who fled the Black Death five years earlier.
It wasn't until the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century that the novella evolved into its own format with the particular structure of length that is familiar in contemporary times.