Kyle Semmel | December 2011

NOTES

What is a novella? And how does it differ from a short story or novel? Is it, as many believe, a question of word count? To John Gardner, 30,000 to 50,000 is the length "most novellas run."1 Mary Doyle Springer, in her terrific study of the novella—Forms of the Modern Novella—suggests another word count: 15,000 to 50,000 words.2 Note how these each push the definition into crowded territory publishers typically reserve for "novels"—above the 40,000 word barrier.

Regardless of which word count you choose, everyone agrees that a novella fits somewhere between a short story and a novel in length. As a long-time reader of novellas, I have never been comfortable with this popularly held definition of the form. How can a story's word count determine what type of story it is? Shouldn't we ask, instead, what does this novella have that this short story doesn't? Or what does this novella not have that this novel does? After all, if we determine a story's form by its word count, couldn't a writer who gives up on her novel at 39,000 words say, "Well, I guess it's not a novel. It can be a novella."

Is it fair to the novella to base its existence not on what's inherently right and good with it, but on its failure to be something else? It's not a novel, so it can be a novella. But a failed novel is exactly that: a failed novel.

Defining the novella primarily in terms of word count—with no recognition of its finer points—does little to recommend it to the reading public. Of course, every so often a major publisher will resurrect it and put out a book of three novellas by a major literary figure—which is to say, an established author, someone who's a known commodity and has probably sold a lot of books. One question I asked myself while writing this essay: How many first-time authors have recently published a collection of novellas? Josh Weil's excellent The New Valley (Grove) and Andrew Ervin's equally terrific Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House) are the only ones that spring to my mind. But I can think of at least four established authors with recent collections: Richard Bausch, Rick Moody, Paul Theroux, and Doris Lessing.

This is all well and good. I don't begrudge these authors or their publishers their books. In fact, each writer has added quality novellas to the novella canon. But since the publishers tend to publish these collections in addition to their major works, they don't promote the novella form per se. They promote the author. I don't have anything against this, either. From either a publisher's or a writer's perspective, anything that promotes the author in a healthy way is good. No harm in that.

What I do find problematic, however, is the apparent marketing strategy many publishers take when offering novellas to the public. "The label 'novella' is not inherent in the work of art," Andrew Ervin writes, "it's a sticker publishers and editors place on the outside of it so that consumers can find it." While this may be true, it's remarkable how many publishers go to great lengths, sometimes comically so, to avoid using the word "novella" in marketing books that are so obviously novellas. Consider Doris Lessing's The Grandmothers; the novellas in that book are called "short novels."3 And how about Richard Ford's Women with Men, a collection of three novellas that the dust jacket of the edition I own calls "a collection of short fiction" or, alternatively, "three stories."4 But they are stories only in the way that a novel is a "story." In the case of Women with Men, it is odd and unfortunate that the word "novella" is omitted from the cover, because the "stories" inside are, in fact, very good examples of the novella form.

As I will argue, many "short novels" are enriched when we consider them novellas instead of novels, because as novels, they lack the kind of depth and complexity that's associated with that form. William Styron's powerful anti-conformist "novel" The Long March is a good example. If we think of it as a novella, it is a rich and complex portrait of military life. But if we think of it as a novel, as good as it is, does it measure up to, say, Sophie's Choice?

What, then, is a novella? How should we read it? What determines it if not word count? Following John Gardner, I wish to put forth that we should consider the novella as having unique attributes that distinguish it from short stories and novels. It should be noted, however, that these features can and should be tinkered with according to the artistic vision of the author. Nevertheless, I believe they provide for a better platform than word count from which to view the form.

In the publishing industry, marketing is the golden key to success. The word "novel" is a marketing tool. It is identifiable to us as something pretty long; if we purchase a print copy, we fork over $15–25 and we know we've got a few days or weeks to sink into the story. A "novella" is also a marketing tool, but one less definable and therefore less "marketable." It is a tough sell to a public that doesn't really know what it is and how it can be an effective fictional vessel, what an early master of the form, Henry James, called "(T)he beautiful and blest nouvelle" (qtd. in Springer).5

Such willful resistance to marketing books as novellas does injustice to the form. By not recognizing the "novella" as a potentially powerful type of fiction in its own right, distinct from short stories and novels, many publishers, in effect, tell both readers and writers that the novella is a stranger we really don't want to let enter into our house. The question is: Why do some publishers choose to ignore the term? It's as though the very word is a variant of smallpox. Put that word anywhere within ten feet of a book and ugly lesions will grow on its pages. Book-buyers won't touch it.

Though I can't know for sure, it's possible that Bausch, Moody, Theroux, and Lessing thought of their works, while writing them, not as failed novels at all but as novellas; that, in other words, they deliberately set out to write novellas. Writers with their skills understand what makes a novella a novella—even if they're not always able to explain it. The 6th edition of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Bausch and R.V. Cassill, has this to say about the novella in its glossary of critical terms:

Novella (or sometimes Novelette): Term of flexible usage, referring basically to the length of the piece of fiction so described, somewhere between a short story (up to about 12,000 words) and a novel (thirty thousand words or more). Because some complexities and developments beyond mere length are involved, it is probably best to think of this class of fiction as being defined by notable examples—as in this text "Heart of Darkness," "The Bear," "The Death of Ivan Ilych," and "Death in Venice" represent this intermediate category.6

That's what it says, and it's not all that helpful. What's more, it complicates matters by suggesting that a novella could be a novella beginning at 12,000 words and ending as low as 30,000 words—it's another example of just how misunderstood this form really is: no one can even agree on the number of words that makes a novella a novella. So what we have is a definition where, yet again, the word count "basically" determines the form, even though the editors admit that "some complexities and developments beyond mere length are involved." That the definition falls back on word count and does not elaborate on "what developments beyond mere length are involved" is indicative of the state of the novella today. Without a proper definition, nobody really seems to take it seriously.

How do authors give their stories the proper "developments beyond mere length" to produce a novella? What Frankenstein transformation turns novels into novellas? (Or for that matter stories into novellas?)

Although it is not possible to dismiss word count entirely from the definition of the novella, I wish to shift the focus away from it; it simply must not be the central concern when reading or constructing a novella. Because it's really not that which should define the form.

In his seminal study The Art of Fiction, John Gardner treats the novella with due respect, as an equally worthy literary form on par with the short story or novel—just with a different set of needs. Gardner—a novelist and long-time teacher of fiction—writes of the novella that "its chief beauty" is that it "moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes." (italics mine)7 He contrasts the novella with the short story, which "moves to a climactic moment of recognition or understanding on the part of the central character or, at least, the reader."8

The novella, according to Gardner, "follow(s) a single line of thought" and reaches "an end wherein the world is... radically changed."9 This, you could say without being incorrect, is also the modus operandi of the short story, and even the novel. But all forms are related in kind; they are, after all, stories. But what's different between the novella and the short story, as Gardner points out, is that a novella contains a series of climaxes, not one only. And it differs from a novel in several important ways, as well. Whereas a novel can reach way beyond a single narrative track, and is sometimes loose and messy—with characters moving in and out of time and place—a novella must be tighter and more controlled. As Gardner says, "The novella normally treats one character and one important action in his life, a focus that leads itself to neat cut-offs, framing."10

Gardner identifies three types of novella: (1) single stream ("a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes");11 (2) non-continuous stream, or "baby novel," ("shifting from one point of view (or focal character) to another, and using true episodes, with time breaks between");12 and (3) pointillist ("moving at random from one point to another").13 Although I recognize that there can be overlap between the three types, allowing room for experimentation—later we'll take a look at Oates's Black Water and see how a great writer can use the form to masterful ends—defining the central types of the genre is critical to understanding the novella form. It gives writers and readers a base to hold onto.

Let's start with single stream novellas. What characterizes this type of novella? They involve relatively few characters and are told from a single point of view; they present a series of climaxes; they move in a single, straightforward direction toward a resolution; they give closure.

In addition to the single stream novellas named in The Art of Fiction, we can find a great many of this most common type. The novellas in Ford's Women with Men would all be classified here. Other novellas that fall into this category would be Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Mann's "Death in Venice," Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (though with a nifty POV shift at the end that creatively tweaks this type of novella), Smiley's "The Age of Grief," McCullers's "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," and Styron's The Long March. Characteristic of these novellas is a focus on one central character (though The Long March tweaks this a bit, too, in an interesting way), with a plot that rises in a generally straight line toward some final resolution. Along the way, as Gardner suggests, the main character(s) meet a number of small climaxes that build or release suspense, only to rise again towards some new climax.

In Ford's novella "Jealous," for example, the seventeen-year-old narrator, Lawrence, leaves his father's house—which is far away from much of anything in rural Montana—to go on a trip with his Aunt Doris to see his mother in Seattle. The first climax we move toward is the narrator's leaving home, his father. Then, driving toward the train station in Shelby, we move toward the second major climax: the police standoff in the Oil City—a bar in Shelby—in which the American Indian Barney is shot and killed. All the while, we learn more about the narrator and his aunt. It's a slow, thoughtful process, but one that is continually moving forward in, well, a single resolute stream. Lawrence and his Aunt Doris enter the denouement following the shocking violence of Barney's death as changed people—and the ending is both satisfying and significant. Though I don't mean to suggest any one form is superior to any other, the gradual build-up to the moment that the single stream novella format allows for contains the richness of the novel with the perfect succinctness of the short story.14

What Gardner doesn't stress in his discussion of the novella in The Art of Fiction I would like to stress here. The novellas I've noted above—and will note below—are not open-ended stories. Which is to say: they have a resolution; there is closure. This seems an obvious point to make. Nevertheless, it is an important point to make. Take a look at Steinbeck's The Red Pony. Steinbeck was certainly no stranger to the novella; his Of Mice and Men is a masterwork of the form. But is The Red Pony a novel or a collection of novellas? It looks like a collection of four novellas, and it reads like one too. Yet none of the sections, with the exception of the first, "The Gift," provide readers with a legitimate sense of closure. Not surprisingly, it's this first section that is the most satisfying to read. The book suffers as a result of its split personality. It doesn't feel complete, either as a novel or as a collection of novellas.15

If long stories don't provide a sense of closure, it might be that what you're looking at is an incomplete novel. Something is missing—characters? action? story?—and more needs to be written to complete the arc of the narrative (or perhaps much has to be removed).

Noncontinuous stream novellas are slightly different than single stream narratives, and they are a little more difficult to pull off, Gardner suggests, because they typically do not rely on the gradual build-up of related scenes but on a juxtaposition of scenes that can be distantly removed in time, place, and character. Non-continuous stream novellas can have multiple narrators and narrative streams. But, importantly, I would argue, there should remain a thematic tightness, a need for climaxes and, finally, closure.

Gardner names D.H. Lawrence's "The Fox" as a successful noncontinuous stream novella, adding that this particular type "makes it possible for (the author) to cover a longer span of time than is customary in the novella and also a greater latitude of style."16 Two more recent novellas have utilized the type to varying degrees of success. Andre Dubus's multi-voiced novella Voices from the Moon and Howard Frank Mosher's "Where the Rivers Flow North."

Along with Jim Harrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, Andre Dubus is perhaps one of the most successful writers of the novella in the last half of the 20th century, making a career out of writing very powerful stories using the form—including "Adultery," "We Don't Live Here Anymore," and "Finding a Girl in America"—but with his Voices from the Moon, Dubus creates a brilliant and moving noncontinuous narrative.

At its core, Voices from the Moon is a family drama without much of a "plot"—though there are climaxes aplenty. Over the course of a single day, Dubus takes us inside the minds of six different characters, members of the same family, the Stowes. The occasion of this narrative is the announcement that the family father, Greg Stowe, will soon marry the oldest son's ex-wife. This sounds explosive, possibly even melodramatic. Yet in Dubus's sharp, vivid storytelling, there is nothing that even remotely resembles melodrama. The novella is structured in alternating chapters; where one character leaves the narrative thread, another picks it up and spools it out further—bringing the reader deeper into this compelling story. The plot of Voices from the Moon essentially involves Greg Stowe telling his children, in succession, that he's fallen—or sunken rather, for as he tells it, "At a certain age, you don't fall. You just sort of gradually sink"17—in love with Larry's former wife. As you can imagine, such a fluctuating narrative design precipitates that each chapter be a kind of mini-story, or scene, with its own vividly imagined dramatic sequence including, that's right, a climactic moment.

In spite of the many voices in the story, Dubus manages to keep his narrative moving around the single "event," flowing outward from the father and down to the children—utilizing a continuous stream effect, so to speak, in a noncontinuous narrative. Interestingly, three of the chapters are narrated by the youngest child, Richie, who as a churchgoing boy with plans to become a priest contrasts with the father's slightly disillusioned adult experience. This adds greater depth to the narrative, particularly since Richie is also tenderly courting a girl. Though "only" a novella, Voices from the Moon has the feel of something much, much larger. Because so many perspectives are imagined, we are permitted a wider window into these characters' lives.

Similarly, Howard Frank Mosher, in his "Where the Rivers Flow North," makes use of the noncontinuous narrative. Like Dubus, he sets his story within a limited scope of time and place, though he doesn't adhere to this strictly—and a reader may get the sense that this novella actually was planned to be something bigger.

It is possible to see Mosher as a kind of William Faulkner of Vermont, and his Kingdom County a Yoknapathawtha County of the north. But Mosher's characters do not sound like copies of those in Faulkner's; they sound like one would imagine countrified northern Vermonters would: wise but a little hickish, and full of noble aphorisms.

In "Where the Rivers Flow North," we move in and out of the voices of the two main characters—farmer Nöel Lourdes and his housekeeper, Bangor. This alone would serve to make the story noncontinuous, but there's an additional chunk of narrative in the middle of the story that moves us completely out of the range of these voices—which is to say, outside the story's narrative arc—using a different, larger voice that reaches far into the past to pull out the artifacts that make the events in the current story richer and more complex; it is the voice, in other words, of an authorial narrator providing background information.

This is a legitimate technique in fiction, and in this story it is a kind of extension of the voices of Nöel and Bango, each of whom is controlled by the authorial presence of the third person focal point of view. Yet it is fundamentally different, and it slows down the narration considerably. In fact, it grinds the action to a screeching halt. Readers catch up with events that shaped this story by forming the historical background of its two principal characters and the region they live in, but at the same time they lose sight of those characters. This is the risk authors using the noncontinuous stream narrative sometimes take: By slipping into waters that are far from the body of land that is their story, they may push the reader into a slipstream and out to sea, never to return.

But there are climaxes in this story. The year is 1927. It's pre-Depression, but for residents of drought-stricken Vermont, it's easy to imagine a kind of depression has already begun. Essentially, the plot involves Nöel and Bangor's attempts to outsmart the authorities who want to flood Nöel's land by building a dam on it, and as with other stories of this nature-where a man is pitted against a system that wishes literally and figuratively to overwhelm him-much of the action necessitates that Nöel go up against the very people who wish to run him off his property. Such stories are compelling because they have a built in protagonist/antagonist. We, the reader, know where we stand. And we like it that way.18

In each of these noncontinuous novellas, the authors more or less adhere to what I view as the central tenets of the novella form: the characters move through a set of climaxes, and they maintain, if not limited point of view, a limited subject matter (i.e. one core "movement") which prods the story forward from beginning to end while keeping a generally tight focus on a central "story." And, finally, there is a neat conclusion that provides a satisfying resolution. Readers are given the broadest possible glimpse of what it means to be human—and all wrapped up inside a tidy little package.

With pointillist novellas, the rarest of Gardner's types, the terrain is much less certain. Here, multiple characters are possible, as are multiple streams of narrative—or mini-stories. But I would argue that these novellas—like all stories—should still lead to some kind of resolution, and be contained within a thematic framework that isn't too loose.

You can examine David Markson's "novels" like Reader's Block, Vanishing Point, or The Last Novel to see fictional pointillism in its purest form. Or you could look at the two examples that Gardner names in The Art of Fiction: William Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and Robert Coover's "Hansel and Gretel." I do not share Gardner's enthusiasm for "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." Gass's work does resemble, as Gardner suggests, an impressionist painting—where the parts add up to a whole not always visible to the naked eye. I have no doubt Gass is out to achieve something both daring and noble with this story. But whether he achieves it is up for debate. The novella seems more like a gangly prose poem than a story, and at times the prose seems overwrought and, as a whole, I think the novella is much less interesting as a work of fiction than it is as a study for literary scholars. Imagine Bob Dylan's pre-motorcycle-accident phase of clever wordplay, and you come close to the playfulness in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country."

But if you are a reader interested in examining this type of novella at greater length—one that Gardner rather dubiously says relies less on climaxes and more on an author's individual "genius"19—to see how they are different from continuous and noncontinuous novellas, then you should read Joyce Carol Oates's brilliant novella Black Water.

What's interesting about Black Water is not only that it could be read as fictional pointillism, but it also shares traits of each of the first two types of novellas discussed above. It offers, in other words, a unique glimpse into just how malleable and buoyant this type of novella—and by extension all novellas—can be.

Oates's story fictionalizes the events leading up to the infamous Chappaquiddick incident involving Senator Ted Kennedy, in which a woman passenger in the car he was driving drowns in a channel in Cape Cod. In this retelling, the events are shifted to "Grayling Island" in Maine and Oates's female protagonist, Kelly Kelleher, is not a former Robert Kennedy campaign worker (as was the historical Mary Jo Kopechne on whom she is based) but a young writer for a Boston magazine called Citizens' Inquiry. The Senator is a man with a strong physical presence, who is "more vibrant, more compelling ... than his television appearances suggested."20 And Kelly Kelleher is drawn to him immediately.

Because the Chappaquiddick incident is well known to us, Oates has some leverage here to do some radical things with the narrative. Rather than telling this story from the straight perspective of a single stream moving forward from A to Z, or in simply bumping us forward and backward in time and place, she chooses to do both simultaneously and in addition to peppering the narrative with raw moments of impressionistic images that function like a refrain in a song—and in so doing jar us to the real tragedy of what's about to occur (or what has already occurred).

The central plot of Black Water is relatively simple. It involves a Fourth of July party, a mutual attraction between Kelly Kelleher and the Senator, an accident, and finally a death. It is told in two parts: the first takes us up to the moment the vehicle plunges into the black water, and the second puts us beneath the water with Kelly Kelleher trying to free herself. As in a continuous or noncontinuous novella, this novella moves forward on a fairly straight line from start to finish. Throughout the novella we learn, through a series of scenes and flashbacks, just who Kelly is and from where she's come. At the same time, and importantly, we're never far from the accident; it keeps occurring again and again. Which is to say: Oates brings us right up to the moment of the accident, and then pulls us back. Time itself is a presence in this novella, how it shifts, breaks, retreats, and returns to the point that could be called the climax: the moment the Senator drunkenly spills his rented vehicle into the black water. For as soon as we're drawn away from the drowning woman, we're back on the road again and returning to that moment where "the black water filled her lungs, and she died."21

If pointillist novellas move from "random" point to point, as Gardner suggests, then Oates's novella proves that "random" doesn't necessarily mean haphazard. Black Water derives much of its shocking power from the way it's told: by the way time is stopped, reversed, played again. Overall, it has the effect of having shone a vital light onto a moment in time that, for many of us, needs no explanation. Imagine if a writer chose to write about the sinking of the Titanic. We all know what's going to happen to the people who step on the boat docked in Southampton, England; it would be easy to tell the tale forward, just letting the ship and the people on it sail to their fate. That's what James Cameron's popular film version did—as well as historian Walter Lord's brilliant depiction of the tragic journey in A Night to Remember—and it makes a certain degree of narrative sense to tell the story that way. Yet imagine if the writer (or director) told the story another way, looping backwards and forwards from the moment of impact with the glacier to the giddy moment when passengers board the doomed ship, and back again. Imagine, too, that all along the narrative line the author places jots of "random" refrains and images that signal the real cost of what will soon be lost when this ship sinks. Imagine that and you'll realize how writers can add an extra layer of richness to their stories.

It's in those moments that pointillist novellas like Oates's achieve their greatest imaginative power.

These are the types of novellas as put forward by John Gardner, and I'm going to preserve them; for now they help us define the form. But they should not be taken as the only means of expression, of course. Nor should this essay be considered the rules for writing a novella. I wish only to highlight what I believe are significant attributes of a literary form that I find both creatively satisfying and sadly misunderstood, and, if possible, to open a positive dialogue about the form that shifts it away from word count. Creative writers open their own valves of expression whenever they sit down to write, and these valves should not be blocked by rigid adherence to type. Still, understanding what makes a novella a novella (as opposed to thinking of it in terms of word count) will give writers (and readers) a clearer guide.

So what does all this mean? Well, to begin with, it means that there's no shame in writing a novella. The novella is not a lesser form than the short story or novel. But due to unfortunate marketing—which either ignores it or gives it another name—it has gained a pariah status. We should amend this. Readers should start reading novellas regularly, and publishers should be more willing to look at mid-range stories with an eye to publishing them. The correlation between supply and demand is obvious: When readers buy novellas publishers are more likely to put them in print.

The interesting thing about the novella is that, considering today's literary marketplace—during a time when the National Endowment for the Arts grimly reports that fewer and fewer people read literary fiction—novellas may be the perfect length for our fast-paced, distracted society. They're long enough to sink into a character's life, but not long enough to bog us down for many, many days. Of course, novellas will never address the fundamental malfunction in our society regarding the reading of fiction: that many readers simply distrust reading something that is not "true," preferring instead the hard "facts" of biography and nonfiction. Nevertheless, with a little marketing push, I believe the novella could be a viable and salable art form.

Not all publishers shun the form, of course. These days, in fact, independent publishers are helping to give the novella new life. Mud Luscious and Caketrain have issued a number of compelling novellas in recent years, Miami University Press runs an annual novella contest, and a host of literary journals actively seek to publish novellas—including one, the Seattle Review, that now publishes exclusively novellas and long poems. Melville House is re-issuing the world's great and classic novellas as part of its "classic Novella Series," and in 2007, Akashic Books published Chris Abani's novella Song for Night as a paperback original—and marketed it as such. And there are plenty more that I don't have the space to name. Even large publishers are getting into the act. In 2010, Scribner published Ann Beattie's Walks with Men (on the jacket it's labeled simply "fiction") and a couple of Don Delillo's recent novellas: Point Omega and the spooky-wonderful The Body Artist. But Delillo and Beattie are big names and, as with so many other novellas, the books weren't marketed as "novellas" (though, to be fair, they did issue and market Pafko at the Wall, the brilliant opening chapter of Underworld, as a novella). No doubt all these books sold wel—a fact that could reflect the authors' names as much as the books themselves. But just imagine if the big publishers marketed such books as novellas instead; novellas could gain greater respect.

Thinking of the novella in terms of word count does not do justice to the form; nor does it come close to amplifying its rich potential. There are elements that make a novella a novella, which I've tried to set down here. There is a real and difficult process to making a novella a vibrant and sophisticated piece of literature. When a writer sits down to write a piece of fiction, she should not shy away from the possibility that her story will be neither a short story nor a novel, but rather a novella. And she should not be afraid, finding herself in a no-man's-land of the dreaded unpublishable word count (or what Stephen King has humorously called "a literary banana republic")22 to continue with her project and make of the narrative what it wishes to be: a story with something different to offer than a short story or novel.

If a story exhibits the abovementioned traits, then I think it's a good bet that what you're looking at is a novella, regardless of what the dust jacket calls it. And rather than compare it to its more complex cousin the novel, or its more diminutive cousin the short story, wouldn't it be better to look at its closest family of relatives—novellas?

Writers should be especially cognizant of the potential inherent in the form. What if the story you want to tell is too long for a short story? What if it does require you to step into a character and follow that character through a series of climaxes until he reaches his moment—or the reader's moment—of understanding? Why try to force the story to be one climax in order to get it published in a literary journal? Or why try to spread your story so thin that it becomes "long enough" for a publisher to consider it a novel? A story must be what it demands to be, and an author who refuses to listen to the logic of her story may make a muddle of it. Though it does not (yet?) have a Best American Novellas series to give it credibility, or a National Novella Award, it is nevertheless an art form like the short story or novel. And it should find a place in a reader's mind and heart-and on bookstore and library shelves.

AWP

K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, World Literature Today, Best European Fiction 2011, and elsewhere. His translation of Norwegian crime novelist Karin Fossum's next novel, The Caller, will be published by Harvill Secker/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

1. John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 179.
2. Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 8.
3. Doris Lessing, The Grandmothers (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), dust jacket.
4. Richard Ford, Women with Men (New York: Vintage, 1997), dust jacket.
5. Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 6.
6. Richard Bausch, R.V. Cassill, eds, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 921.
7. John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 183.
8. Ibid., p. 183.
9. Ibid., p. 183.
10. Ibid., p. 183.
11. Ibid, p. 181.
12. Ibid, p. 182.
13. Ibid. p. 182.
14. Richard Ford, Women with Men (New York: Vintage, 1997).
15. John Steinbeck, The Red Pony (New York: Bantam, 1966).
16. John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 182.
17. Andre Dubus, Voices from the Moon (Boston: David Godine, 1984), p. 101.
18. Howard Frank Mosher, Where the Rivers Flow North (New York: Viking Penguin, 1978).
19. John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 182.
20. Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water (New York: Dutton, 1992), p. 38.
21. Ibid., p.109.
22. Stephen King, Different Seasons (New York: Viking Adult, 1982), introduction.