It's complicated … Jeremy Irons (as Swann) and Ornella Muti in the 1984 film Swann In Love
Novellas are wonderful things. Slender, pocket-able, and, at their best, just as powerful as their bigger, bulkier brothers. For reader and writer alike, they pose less risk. A reader can try out a new author without surrendering to a tome, and writers, equally, can use novellas as testing grounds. They're quicker to write, quicker to read… though actual length is a much-debated factor. For this piece, I draw the line at 55,000 words, though I admit it took a little too long to count. Perhaps thickness – thinness – in your hand is the main thing.
Once considered an outmoded form, the novella has recently found strong champions. The TLS described Peirene Press's contemporary European novellas as "literary cinema… two-hour books to be devoured in a single sitting"; Stateside, Melville House has its Art of the Novella series, and over in Paris, the much-loved Shakespeare & Company bookshop runs its international Paris literary prize for an unpublished novella.
A prize which, two summers ago, I won. My story was set on Sark: a careless, street-lamp-less Channel Island with a tip-to-toe length of three miles, and I'd chosen a novella because I wanted the form to be similar in size. (This is why, when I later turned the piece into a novel, I left the first half as it was, and added a part two.)
A open-themed top 10 novellas list is obliged to include Animal Farm and The Old Man and the Sea, so I've added a qualifier. The novellas that follow are about love. But complicated love: ill-fated, unrequited, even illegal. (Coincidentally, half are set in France. Another personal obsession rearing its head.)
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Once considered an outmoded form, the novella has recently found strong champions. The TLS described Peirene Press's contemporary European novellas as "literary cinema… two-hour books to be devoured in a single sitting"; Stateside, Melville House has its Art of the Novella series, and over in Paris, the much-loved Shakespeare & Company bookshop runs its international Paris literary prize for an unpublished novella.A prize which, two summers ago, I won. My story was set on Sark: a careless, street-lamp-less Channel Island with a tip-to-toe length of three miles, and I'd chosen a novella because I wanted the form to be similar in size. (This is why, when I later turned the piece into a novel, I left the first half as it was, and added a part two.)
A open-themed top 10 novellas list is obliged to include Animal Farm and The Old Man and the Sea, so I've added a qualifier. The novellas that follow are about love. But complicated love: ill-fated, unrequited, even illegal. (Coincidentally, half are set in France. Another personal obsession rearing its head.)
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