The novella lurks on the margins of the English-language literary world. Its history includes such masterpieces as Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.In North America, at least, novellas are rarely published alone. Instead they typically appear in threes (Richard Ford’s Women with Men, 1997; Rick Moody’s Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas, 2007) or with a number of short stories (Mavis Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 1973; Julie Keith’s The Devil Out There, 2000). That's when they appear at all.
It’s not as though we have such precise notions of the
length of a novel, often described as being a narrative fiction "of a certain length.” Novels published tend to be in the 80,000-120,000 word range.
“A cap of about 110K seems to be the ‘industry hard cover standard’".The
novella clocks in around 30,000-50,000 words: “Very
much too long to be a
short story, and very much too short to be a novel, according to one guide, who urges writers to stretch the novella into a novel. Or to tuck it into a desk drawer until after you've written and published three novels.
Are there economic reasons that can explain the otherwise
odd prejudice against the novella? There are certainly arguments, some of them economic, to be made for
brevity, not to mention the possibility of wit.
All the more reason, surely, to cheer for these dry, wry comments recently quoted in The New York Times:"Let’s free the novella of prizes and awards and citations and all manner of gold star. Let’s fail to educate our students about the novella, fail to convince them of its charms. That way, we need never be nostalgic for the Golden Age of the novella. We’ve got something they don’t want, a noncommodity, and we need to look out for it.”
These comments are adapted from "The Three-Day Weekend Plan," an essay by John Brandon in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (Soft Skull, 2011). Brandon finds a volume of three novellas “more intriguing than one flabby novel.” I find it curious that, as a lover of the novella, he does not speak on behalf of the slim volume with a single novella.
Someone should tell him about Toronto’s Quattro Books, a publisher of single-volume novellas including Amela Marin’s The Sea and Tobacco Wars, by Paul Seesequasis (both published in 2010).
Linda Leith
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Aside from necessary funds, restoring a landscape or great garden requires patience, understanding, knowledge, and a good helping of genius. Gardens, unlike pyramids or palaces, can disappear through neglect, financial collapse, or death of original maker. They are often staked to the fortunes of the families.
Eden Project, Cornwall
The Erechtheion
The Acropolis can lead to poetry or hallucinations of deities. I failed to see divinity, but I absorbed the beauty of the Erechtheion, especially the six caryatids forming the Ionic columns of its so-called Porch of the Maidens. Absorption seems the accurate term.
ICAROS: A VISION, the internationally acclaimed film by Leonor Caraballo & Matteo Norzi, produced by Abou Farman, will be screening in Canada, starting in Vancouver on July 28th, where it opens for a week-long run at Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancity Theatre, and then in Montreal as part of Montreal First People's Festival Présence autochthone on August 7th, Cinéma du Parc, 7 p.m.
by Kenneth Radu
Wicked company, therefore, is to be understood as the hostile official attitude towards men (mostly men) of intellectual daring who challenged the assumptions of religion and society. Inconvenient thinkers could be imprisoned and atheists could still be executed at the time, a practice I believe some would wish to continue today. That was the purpose of the radical salon: room for a coterie of free thinkers to converse bravely on many subjects, including dangerous critiques of the ancien régime and the Church, without fear of reprisal, at least from their fair hostess.
