Sagan’s famously scandalous novel of youthful hedonism, published (also famously) when Sagan was just 19 herself, is much more psychologically nuanced than widely credited. Irene Ash, Bonjour Tristesse (1955) : 160 pages ” Actually, now I’m thinking that it might be a good book to re-read in pandemic isolation.įrançoise Sagan, tr. Maybe yours, too? “It was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI inertia overcame me. Doestoevsky’s first masterpiece has been wildly influential in the development of existential and dystopian storytelling of all kinds, not to mention in the development of my own high school misanthropy. Probably the best rant ever passed off as literature.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Notes from Underground (1864) : 154 pages An utterly absorbing and deeply pleasurable novel.įyodor Dostoevsky, tr. Isherwood’s miniature, jewel-like masterpiece takes place over a single day in the life of a middle-aged English expat (who shares a few qualities with Isherwood himself), a professor living uneasily in California after the unexpected death of his partner. After that excellent opening paragraph, it only gets better.Ĭhristopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964) : 152 pages If you’re reading this space, you probably already know how much we love this book at Literary Hub. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) : 146 pages
The strange, fragmented ghost story that famously paved the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude (according to Gabriel García Márquez himself), but is an enigmatic masterpiece in its own right. Margaret Sayers Peden, Pedro Páramo (1955) : 128 pages But Camus himself put it this way, writing in 1955: “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” Is it the thinking person’s Catcher in the Rye? Who can say. I had a small obsession with this book as a moody teen, and I still think of it with extreme fondness. Matthew Ward, The Stranger (1942) : 123 pages One of the landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, about not only race but also gender and class-not to mention self-invention, perception, capitalism, motherhood and friendship-made indelible by what Darryl Pinckney called “a deep fatalism at the core.”Īlbert Camus, tr. However, your personal edition might not exactly match the number I have listed here. Dalloway, Black No More, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. I did not include a book below unless I could find that it had been published at least once in fewer than 200 pages-which means that some excellent novels, despite coming tantalizingly close to the magic number, had to be left off for want of proof (see Mrs.
Most importantly for our purposes here: lengths vary with editions, sometimes wildly. I did not differentiate between novels and novellas (as Steven Millhauser would tell you, the novella is not a form at all, but merely a length), but let’s be honest with ourselves: “The Dead” is a short story, and so is “The Metamorphosis.” Sorry! I limited myself to one book by each author, valiantly, I should say, because I was tempted to cheat (looking at you Jean Rhys). Yes, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, but one has to draw the line somewhere (though I let myself fudge on translation dates). Last year, I wrote about the best contemporary novels under 200 pages, so now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics-which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”Ī few notes: Because the “contemporary” list surveyed novels published since 1970 (inclusive), this list will define “classic” as being originally published before 1970. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that-for me, anyway-feels the longest.
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