False Water Society
Ben Marcus
Ojjiba
Barbara Guest
Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo
Shelley Jackson
Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis
Robert Olen Butler
The Cure
John Hawkes
My Man
Wendy Walker
Sunday
Harry Mathews
Several Bawdy Acts
Stacy Doris
Meditaton: First and Last Trek, Zangskar
Nathaniel Tarn
From Present Tense
Stephen Ratcliffe
From Album
Melanie Neilson
Three Stories
John Barth
Market Tender Family
Kevin Magee
Two Poems
Ann Lauterbach
Orison
Donald Revell
Preservation News
Allan Gurganus
Rolling Beads
Robert Antoni
Love Sentence
Lynne Tillman
The Displaced
Arno Schmidt and Translated by John E. Woods
A Chocolate Malted for Charles Ives
Paul West
Cover art © 1994 by James Surls: How Far Back (1989). Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery.
The novella has long been a recluse, an outcast in the family of literary styles. It is disobedient and can’t be edited down or extended without bringing on disaster. Its narrative development and elaboration of conflict and character are more complex than in the typical short story, but it forgoes the superabundant modulation, the polyphonic and contrapuntal notes that define a novel’s progress. The five novellas gathered here are vastly different in form and tone, mood and method, but each displays a luminosity found nowhere else.
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