Chekhov's Mistress
The Short List
Covered: A list of great short books (only I left out Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)
Recently, the blog Return of the Reluctant posted his “Thick-Ass Book List.” I hadn’t read too many of the books. I scored a 3-1/6 (including Swann’s Way as the 1/6th and adding War & Peace myself, all stretching it a bit). So I thought I would put up my own list, but instead of “thick-ass” books, I would put up some shorties. It is summer after all. So here is my highly subjective list of great short books. Everything here is inside of 200 pages. There are no short stories, but a couple, like DreamTigers and Invisible Cities are somewhat uncategorical but too amazing to leave out. They are in no particular order:
Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba
Carlos Fuentes, Inez
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Jorge Louis Borges, DreamTigers
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
comments
6 here. You may want to check out Melville House’s catalog. They just published a few splashy short novellas just in time for summer. I’d add Ian McEwan’s “The Cement Garden,” Herman Melville’s “Bartleby,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce,” Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Antoine de Saint-Expuery’s “The Little Prince” and Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”
– Ed (07/27 at 01:19 PM)
I tried to stay away from short story collections because the list could grow infinitely, thus I didn’t include “The Dead” or “Metamorphosis.” Great suggestions though, see my next post.
– Chekhov's Mistress (07/27 at 02:12 PM)
Man I really am illiterate. Not a sinlge one on this list! Must make own list . . .
– kevin holtsberry (07/27 at 08:15 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: July 27, 2004
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:3
- Links to this Post: Technorati
