#novellas — Public Fediverse posts

Old Blood, Still Warm: On John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are books I associate with a season so completely that reading them outside it feels almost indecent. October belongs to horror, to Gothic fiction. My Penguin Speculative Fiction Special containing John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been sitting on my shelves since I bought it at Fully Booked last year, and this seemed the proper month to take it down again. I have decided, rather arbitrarily but with conviction, that until November I shall read (and reread) horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Adam Nevill, Stephen King. A month of bad houses, old graves, and people who should know better than to investigate noises after midnight.

I had read The Vampyre ages ago. Encountering Polidori again as an adult was strangely humbling because I still struggled with him. The prose has that Gothic-Romantic density in which a sentence sometimes seems to have wandered in from another century wearing a black coat and refusing to explain itself. More than once I had to recite passages aloud, slowly, simply to hear where the thought was going. Oddly, this made me enjoy the language more. I take pleasure in prose that resists being skimmed. Modern reading trains the eye to consume; Polidori occasionally forces the mouth to participate.

The story itself is skeletal by later standards. Aubrey, a wealthy young Englishman, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ruthven, an aristocrat whose cold presence brings ruin wherever he goes. They travel together until Aubrey, repelled by Ruthven, leaves him. In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, who tells him tales of vampires, and soon she is murdered. Ruthven later reappears, is apparently killed by bandits, and extracts an oath from Aubrey that his death will remain secret for a year and a day. Then Ruthven turns up alive in London and courts Aubrey’s sister. Bound by his promise and increasingly thought mad, Aubrey can do almost nothing. The machinery is crude in places, the characters thin, the ending brutally abrupt. Yet the idea has teeth.

What fascinates me now is the kind of vampire Polidori created. Ruthven is not a rotting peasant corpse crawling out of folkloric soil. He is an aristocrat. He enters drawing rooms. He possesses money, breeding, composure, sexual magnetism. Predation has learned manners. The vampire becomes social rather than merely supernatural. Ruthven feeds upon trust before he feeds upon blood. Evil has discovered that elegance is excellent camouflage.

Behind this small story stands one of literary history’s absurdly productive evenings. At Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician John Polidori entertained themselves with ghost stories during that famously dismal summer. Byron proposed that each attempt one. Mary’s nightmare grew into Frankenstein. Byron produced a vampire fragment. Polidori took the germ of that idea and made something of his own from it, creating Lord Ruthven, whose aristocratic menace was unmistakably “Byronic.” When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, it was initially tangled up with Byron’s name, an irony almost too perfect: the literary vampire was born partly from the glamour of a living celebrity who already seemed to society half damned.

Then there is Carmilla, altogether richer to me, and far more enduring as fiction. I have read it several times, most recently last year. I know its movements almost by heart: Laura’s isolated life in a Styrian castle, the strange carriage accident, the arrival of the languid Carmilla, their growing intimacy, Laura’s weakening health, the portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and the recognition that the beloved guest and the ancient dead woman are the same creature. None of this can surprise me anymore. It does not need to.

That may be the clearest sign that a Gothic story has survived its own plot. Once the scare is gone, atmosphere remains. Le Fanu’s prose is more supple than Polidori’s, and Laura’s retrospective narration gives the story the texture of a memory that was never successfully buried. Carmilla loves Laura, or claims to, and the story refuses to make that love simple. Her tenderness has possession inside it. Her erotic language can sound devotional and then suddenly annihilating. Laura is repelled and attracted, frightened yet fascinated. Le Fanu understood that intimacy can be terrifying because it dissolves boundaries. To be loved completely can carry a fantasy of being consumed completely. Vampire fiction makes that metaphor embarrassingly literal.

Published twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla already contains much of the later vampire grammar, but its peculiar power belongs to its ambiguity. There is something sad about Carmilla that adaptations often descend into lesbian-vampire spectacle. She is monstrous, certainly, but she is also old, repetitive, trapped in appetite. Immortality has not enlarged her existence. She performs the same seduction, the same feeding, the same return to the grave. The vampire promises escape from death and delivers another kind of prison. Perhaps that is why old vampire fiction interests me more than stories in which immortality becomes a glamorous superpower. Eternal life ought to be psychologically expensive.

Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were among my introductions to this world when I was a teenager, back when I was a Goth and took the whole aesthetic with suitable seriousness: the literature, the music, the clothes, the delicious morbidity of it all. I can smile at that former version of me without disowning it. Taste changes, but some early fascinations sink deeper than taste. I still love old castles, doomed aristocrats, candlelit corridors, decaying families, impossible women returning from the dead, the Byronic anti-hero. Apparently some things survive adolescence.

Reading Polidori and Le Fanu together made me think about how much vampire fiction has changed while its central anxiety has remained stable. The vampire is death with personality. It speaks. It courts. It asks to be invited closer. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to these stories. Death in ordinary life is mute and impersonal. Gothic fiction gives it a face beautiful enough to look at, then makes the mistake of letting it smile.

My First Encounter with Hemingway, Unfortunately Involving Fishing: On Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

I bought The Old Man and the Sea sometime last year, placed it on the shelf, and proceeded to ignore it. Hemingway had always been one of those enormous literary names I knew I would eventually have to confront, almost out of obligation. Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway. The Mount Rushmore effect. Eventually curiosity, guilt over an unread purchase, and the convenient fact that the book is barely more than a hundred pages won out. I finished it in perhaps two sittings.

And now I am not entirely sure what I think of it.

This was my first Hemingway, which may have been the first mistake. The Old Man and the Sea is short, famous, Nobel-adjacent, Pulitzer-winning, endlessly discussed in literary and reading circles, and therefore looks like the obvious doorway into Hemingway. It may not be. For long stretches, I felt as though I were reading an extremely detailed account of fishing written for someone who already understood why fishing mattered. Lines, hooks, currents, bait, birds, the positioning of the hands, the movement of the fish beneath the water. There are no chapters to provide even the psychological illusion of progress. Santiago goes to sea, hooks an enormous marlin, and then the ordeal begins.

That is essentially the plot.

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching anything. Once considered terribly unlucky, he sets out alone and hooks a marlin so enormous that instead of hauling it toward the boat, the fish begins pulling him farther out to sea. For days the old man endures hunger, exhaustion, cramped hands, wounds, sleeplessness, and solitude while developing an almost mystical respect for the creature he intends to kill. Eventually he harpoons the marlin and lashes it to his skiff, only for sharks to descend upon it during the journey home. By the time Santiago reaches shore, practically nothing remains except the skeleton.

A triumph reduced to evidence.

That, finally, was where the book began to make sense to me.

I had initially been waiting for psychological revelation, some penetration into Santiago’s inner life beyond the immediate questions of endurance and fishing. I wanted character excavation. Hemingway largely refuses it. Santiago’s psychology is strangely externalized. His character exists in what he does, what he endures, and what he refuses to surrender. He talks to himself because there is nobody else there. He talks to the fish. He talks to birds. He talks about baseball and Joe DiMaggio, who, I learned, was a famous American professional baseball player. His mind circles around pain, hunger, technique, memory, luck, the boy Manolin, and the fish pulling him toward some increasingly abstract confrontation with himself.

There is pride in all of it, certainly. Maybe too much pride.

Santiago does not merely want food. The marlin becomes proof. Proof that he remains what he once was. Proof that age has not entirely conquered him. Proof that eighty-four empty days have not rendered him useless. He wants to catch the fish because catching the fish would vindicate his existence as a fisherman. This gives the story its distinctly masculine quality, at least as I experienced it. There is something almost archaic about it. Man goes into nature. Man encounters magnificent beast. Man suffers. Man conquers beast. Nature retaliates. Man returns wounded but spiritually undefeated. It could have been told beside a fire three thousand years ago.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

Santiago repeatedly calls the marlin his brother, admires its dignity, marvels at its strength, and yet remains committed to killing it. That contradiction is probably the most interesting psychological element in the book. Love does not prevent destruction. Respect does not cancel violence. Santiago recognizes something of himself in the fish, which makes the killing stranger rather than easier. He kills the thing he most admires because defeating it is how he measures himself.

There is tragedy in that.

The sharks make the tragedy almost cruelly mathematical. Santiago achieves the impossible and then watches the achievement disappear bite by bite. All that suffering, all that magnificent struggle, reduced to a carcass before anyone can properly see what he has done. The marlin begins to resemble ambition itself. Glory cannot be preserved. Victory decomposes. One may conquer something enormous and still return home with almost nothing to show for it.

Except the knowledge that it happened.

The Christian symbolism is difficult to miss once Santiago’s ordeal reaches its end. His wounded hands suggest stigmata. He carries the mast upon his shoulders after returning home, an unmistakably Christlike image. He collapses exhausted and sleeps with his arms outstretched. His suffering acquires the shape of sacrifice. But I do not think Hemingway turns Santiago into Christ in any straightforward religious sense. The symbolism seems less doctrinal than mythic. Santiago suffers so completely that suffering itself becomes transfiguring. The flesh fails, the prize is destroyed, but some interior dignity survives.

This is also where Manolin, the boy in the book, becomes important. I did not feel especially attached to the boy, perhaps because Hemingway gives so little psychological texture to their relationship. Yet his devotion to Santiago supplies the tenderness the book otherwise desperately needs. Manolin brings him food, worries over him, believes in him when others do not, and ultimately chooses loyalty over the judgment of his parents. The old man speaks constantly of wishing the boy were with him. Beneath all the masculine endurance and heroic solitude is a man who does not actually want to be alone.

That detail changed Santiago somewhat for me.

His independence is not absolute. He longs for companionship. He needs Manolin’s affection even if he can survive physically without it. The boy represents continuity, perhaps even immortality of a modest kind. Santiago’s body is deteriorating, but whatever he knows can pass into another person. The old fisherman may lose the marlin, but he has not entirely lost his place in the world.

Hemingway’s prose, meanwhile, is exactly what I had been told Hemingway’s prose would be: stripped down, direct, almost aggressively unornamented. There are moments of tremendous beauty, but Hemingway rarely appears interested in showing off the beauty of a sentence. He would rather make the sentence disappear. After writers who revel in language, this austerity can feel almost suspicious. I sometimes wanted more texture, more psychological intricacy, more verbal pleasure. Instead Hemingway gives nouns and verbs and physical facts. Sea. Fish. Rope. Hand. Blood. Pain.

It is easy to mistake simplicity for shallowness, though, and I suspect I did that occasionally while reading.

The novel’s depth lies less in psychological analysis than in compression. Santiago does not explain himself because his struggle is the explanation. Hemingway seems interested in the ancient philosophical question of what remains when almost everything else has been stripped away. Comfort disappears. Society disappears. Youth disappears. Luck disappears. Eventually even victory disappears. What remains is conduct.

That famous Hemingway ideal of grace under pressure suddenly becomes comprehensible here. Santiago cannot control whether the sharks come. He cannot control his age. He cannot control luck. He cannot even fully control what becomes of the marlin once he has killed it. He can only control how he meets each successive humiliation.

I understand, then, why The Old Man and the Sea is considered great. Understanding greatness, however, is not identical with loving the book.

I admired it more after finishing it than while actually reading it. During the reading itself I often struggled to care about the mechanics of fishing, and Santiago never became fully alive to me in the psychological way that my favorite literary characters do. Perhaps that is unfair. Perhaps Hemingway was doing something deliberately different from the novelists I instinctively prefer. He subtracts where others accumulate. He withholds where others interpret.

Still, as an introduction to Hemingway, I am not convinced this was the right book for me. Maybe I should have started with A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, or even some of the short stories, where human relationships occupy more of the foreground. I am not finished with Hemingway. One novella is hardly enough evidence to convict a writer, much less canonize him.

For now, The Old Man and the Sea remains something peculiar in my reading life: a book I respected without particularly enjoying, a book whose meaning became more interesting only after I had escaped the boat.

Perhaps Santiago would disapprove of that phrasing. Then again, I have never tried fishing.

Presenting my 2026 awards eligibility post, as both author and editor. An amazing year! Thank you to readers for following the journey. Thank you for any nominations. 
https://jendiagammon.com/2026/09/28/2026-awards-eligibility-post-for-jendia-gammon/
#books #fiction #novels #novellas #shortstories #anthologies

Tell Me About the Rabbits One More Time: On John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is my first Steinbeck, and as per usual, I went into it knowing practically nothing. Of course I knew the title. I knew Steinbeck’s name and had some hazy association of him with the Great Depression, poverty, migrant labor, dusty American landscapes, perhaps men in overalls staring grimly toward the horizon. That was about the extent of my preparation. I did not know George and Lennie were waiting for me. I certainly did not know what Steinbeck was going to do to them.

Perhaps ignorance is the way to read certain books.

The book is astonishingly short, almost suspiciously so. My copy is only a little over a hundred pages, and I finished it in probably two sittings. Yet it has the emotional weight of something much larger. I have read novels three times its length that contain half its humanity. Steinbeck’s prose is plain, controlled, sometimes almost biblical in its simplicity, but there is an enormous difference between simple writing and simplistic writing. He knows precisely how much to say and when to stop. The restraint is part of the cruelty. This is what I like about novellas. Steinbeck does not need four or five hundred pages to construct a world because the world he wants to show us is already narrow: a bunkhouse, a ranch, a few men, a woman, some rabbits that exist mostly in the imagination, and two itinerant workers carrying between them a private mythology about a piece of land they will someday own.

That dream matters because almost everyone in this book is lonely, worn down, or disappointed by life. George and Lennie, at least, have each other.

I felt particularly for George. There is a weariness in him that Steinbeck never sentimentalizes. He loves Lennie, although “love” is perhaps too neat a word for what exists between them. There is affection, obligation, frustration, pity, companionship, responsibility, even resentment. George must constantly think for two people. He anticipates Lennie’s mistakes, explains the world to him, protects him from other people and other people from him.

Lennie, meanwhile, possesses tremendous physical strength and almost no understanding of its consequences. He likes soft things. Mice. Puppies. Rabbits. A woman’s hair. He reaches toward the world with the innocence of a child while inhabiting a body capable of terrible damage. What he loves, he destroys. And somehow that innocence touched me.

Not because Lennie is harmless. He isn’t. That is precisely the tragedy. Innocence and harmlessness are not the same thing, and Steinbeck understands the distinction. Lennie does not comprehend evil in the ordinary moral sense, yet suffering follows him anyway. Intentions cannot resurrect a dead mouse, restore a crushed hand, or bring a dead woman back to life. I prefer morality to be clean. I want guilt to correspond neatly to intention. Steinbeck instead gives you someone capable of horrifying acts without possessing anything you’d comfortably call malice.

Then there is George.

He complains about Lennie. He fantasizes about the easier life he could have alone. He scolds him like a child, protects him like a brother, guides him like a parent, and sometimes seems almost imprisoned by him. And yet George stays. That matters.

They do not appear to be blood relatives, which makes the bond stranger and, to me at least, more moving. George has no obvious familial obligation to Lennie. Whatever obligation exists has been created between them. Friendship has become responsibility. Their relationship fascinated me because at times George and Lennie seemed less like two companions than two portions of the same human being. I kept entertaining the thought, perhaps unfairly, perhaps too psychologically, that Lennie could almost be George’s invention. A psychic double. George is calculation, restraint, memory, caution. Lennie is appetite, impulse, fantasy, longing. George knows reality. Lennie inhabits desire. George remembers what must be done. Lennie remembers the rabbits. Together they form something strangely whole.

Maybe that is why their separation at the end feels like an amputation.

Their dream of owning land is similarly divided between them. George supplies its architecture; Lennie supplies its faith. George describes the little farm, the vegetables, the animals, the freedom from bosses. Lennie returns obsessively to the rabbits. “Tell about the rabbits” becomes almost a prayer.

The farm is less an economic ambition than an imagined refuge from contingency. A few acres. Vegetables. Animals. Rabbits. No boss. No running. No fear. If they can only reach that place, perhaps George can stop worrying and Lennie can finally exist somewhere without accidentally destroying what he touches.

Steinbeck seems to understand that some dreams are necessary precisely because they may never happen. They allow people to endure the present.

There is very little excess in his writing. The prose is plain without being impoverished, lyrical without showing off. Even the beautiful descriptions of nature are not merely decorative. The landscape seems indifferent to the human dramas occurring inside it. Men suffer, dream, kill, disappear. The river continues. The trees remain. Nature neither condemns nor absolves anyone.

And Steinbeck prepares you for the ending long before it arrives.

One part that devastated me even before Lennie’s death was Candy’s old dog. The dog is ancient, weak, suffering, no longer useful. Candy has had him since he was a pup, but he eventually agrees to let Carlson put him down. Rationally, it is mercy. Emotionally, it is something much harder. Candy has to consent to losing a creature that has accompanied him for years. Afterward, he regrets that he did not kill the dog himself.

That regret hangs over George’s final decision. Candy teaches him, perhaps without meaning to, that if someone you love must die, there may be one final and horrible tenderness in making sure the last hand upon him is yours. I hated that this made sense.

The ending devastated me because George does not simply kill Lennie. He gives him the dream one final time. He tells him about the rabbits.

Lennie dies facing the world he wanted rather than the world coming to punish him. George allows him to remain inside the dream until the final second. It is violence that resembles mercy, or mercy forced to take the shape of violence. I do not know that the distinction can ever be made comfortable.

And George is free afterward. That may be the cruelest thing one can say about the ending.

No more running because of Lennie. No more explaining. No more watching him. No more carrying another man’s life alongside his own. George has finally obtained the independence he sometimes imagined wanting, but only by destroying the person who made that independence seem desirable.

The dream of freedom arrives, except it looks nothing like the dream.

For this reason, I ultimately read Of Mice and Men as a story about saying goodbye.

Not merely a goodbye to Lennie, but a goodbye to the person one has been while loving another person. George kills Lennie, yes, but he also kills the strange little world that existed only because there were two of them inside it. The farm dies. The rabbits die. Their private language dies. George will continue living, presumably, but the George who traveled with Lennie is finished.

Perhaps this is why my idea of Lennie as George’s psychological double refuses to leave me. If Lennie represents some dependent, dreaming, innocent portion of George himself, then the final gunshot becomes darker still. Survival sometimes demands that you abandon possibilities you once needed in order to keep living.

A very short book, then. Barely enough pages to occupy two sittings.

And somehow enough room for an entire goodbye.

"I smiled and walked over, placed a consoling hand on Sonny’s back – and shoved hard. With surprised eyes, Sonny’s body rotated as he fell. He slung curse words back up at me that intensified and diminished like a magical lighthouse of profanity."

Last part of MN Wiggins's "The Gathering" in issue 20

#funny #fiction #humor #humour #serials #novellas #writingcommunity #readingcommunity #darkhumor #golf #undead #DeathByChocolate

https://onceuponacrocodile.wordpress.com/current-issue/the-gathering-part-v/

PITCH-PERFECT GRUNGE HORROR novella evokes 1994 New Jersey, Final Girl angst, lost friendship, and the surreal life of a crappy amusement park with elegant precision. Dreamlike terrorscapes complete the picture. A MINUS

https://bookshop.org/p/books/amusement-park-arcana-jennifer-r-donohue/7544806fe6108f7e?ean=9781945548406&bkshp-astro=t

@bookstodon

#book #Books #bookreview #bookreviews #bookstodon #fiction #novella #novellas #horror #historicalfiction #SelfPublishedSunday

So @rtw had a great idea- what are your favorite novellas? Post em with the #novella tag. His choices were so good- mine are The Stranger and Animal Farm.

#novellas #Bookstodon

SLEEK PARANORMAL NOIR is bluesy, queer, and unapologetically Black. Set in a magical city where detective summons the dead and angels, demons, vampires and ghosts rub shoulders with the living; richly engaging. B PLUS

https://www.neonhemlock.com/books/the-dead-withheld

@bookstodon

#book #books #bookreview #bookreviews #fiction #novella #novellas #fantasy #paranormal #noir #lgbtqai #lgbtqai2s #Blackwriters #SmallPressSunday

Nagori est la nouvelle collection de novellas des Nouvelles éditions Actusf !

On vous en parle ici et on vous en parlera toute cette semaine ➡️ https://buff.ly/Noqjp0P

Le logo est de Lisa Santalucia.

#sciencefiction #fantasy #novellas

Saw this over on Bluesky; #wss366 folks and others here might be interested. #writing #ShortStories #FlashFiction #novellas

https://wyldblood.com/submissions-2/

La collection de novellas RéciFs des éditions Argyll regorge de pépites. Et "Colorer le monde" en est une parfaite illustration. Dans ce recueil, l’autrice chinoise Mu Ming nous propose deux nouvelles axées notamment sur les nouvelles technologies, le langage, l’art, et notre perception du monde. Passionnant !

Ma chronique par ici : https://loveinbooks.com/2025/12/19/colorer-le-monde-mu-ming/

#mastolivre #mastobook #colorerlemonde #argyll #muming #novellas #nouvelles #sf

TWO INTERTWINED THRILLERS, one set in the near past and one in the near future, are high-adrenaline pageturners that also serve as meditations on identity, perception, the power of technology, and Japan’s place in the world. Thoughtful fun. A MINUS

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/seesaw-monster-kotaro-isaka/1146125253?ean=9781419777073

@bookstodon

#book #Books #bookreview #bookreviews #bookstodon #fiction #novella #novellas #Japanesewriters #thriller #thrillers #sciencefiction #suspense

From the British Fantasy Society:

With the latest entry in the Twisted Tales series about to be unleashed, Daniel Willcocks returns to tell us more about the creepy Christmas novella Slay.

https://britishfantasysociety.org/from-pen-to-print-daniel-willcocks-on-slay/

#horror #christmasbooks #christmashorror #festivehorror #writing #writers #books #novellas

Envy by Yuri Olesha

Envy by Yuri Olesha is a satirical novel that explores the tensions between the old and new Soviet society through the relationship between two main characters: Andrei Babichev, a successful and confident Soviet food industry manager, and Nikolai Kavalerov, a bitter and envious young man whom Babichev takes in. The novel contrasts Babichev’s embodiment of Soviet ideals—progress, collectivism, and industrial success—with Kavalerov’s disillusionment, individualism, and sense of alienation. Through Kavalerov’s envy and resentment, Olesha critiques the emotional and psychological costs of Soviet modernization and the loss of individual identity in a society driven by collective goals.

Translated by J. C. Butler
Designed by Mikhail Krakovsky

You can get the book here and here.

Twitter: @MirTitles
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Bluesky: mirtitles.bsky.social

#novellas #russianLiterature #sovietLiterature

I can't sell books if people don't know I have books for sale.

I have books for sale: https://books2read.com/ap/6n661n/Grey-Liliy

I have a bunch of genres and most are novella if you need a quick read. :D

#indieauthor #novellas #writing #selfpublished

I've just finished "Michael Kohlhaas", the 1810 novella by Heinrich von Kleist.

I think I'm right in saying that this work is well known throughout the German speaking world but is of much lesser renown amongst English speakers, even though allusions such as that in E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" show that it is not completely obscure.

For those unfamiliar with the novella, Wikipedia summarizes the plot as showing

>>the wrongs done to horse trader Michael Kohlhaas by a minor aristocrat. His attempts to obtain redress through the legal system are thwarted by the aristocrat's connections. Kohlhaas gathers sympathisers to capture the miscreant, which escalates into a violent campaign against towns that take in the fleeing noble. Kohlhaas is captured and sentenced to death. Just before being executed Kohlhaas achieves some revenge by swallowing a written prophecy of great personal concern to the regional ruler. <<

Going beyond the plot summary to the actual work will afford the reader the sense of being lost in a set of arcane legal processes that defy not only justice but intelligibility as well.

That juridical labyrinth is no doubt what appealed to Kafka, prompting him to give a public reading of the novella in Prague.

Martin Greenberg, the translator of the edition I read, was drawn to Kleist by his previous work on Kafka. Greenberg notes how "Michael Kohlhaas" presages "The Castle" but also writes testily of how the "realism" of the novella is disrupted by the "shadowy Gothic fantasticness" of the conclusion, which he deems "unsatisfactory".

Greenberg was writing in 1960, when a critical climate of modernism was less sympathetic to the introduction of a disguised gypsy prophetess as plot device than was the romantic era in which saw the publication of"Michael Kohlhaas".

More than half a century after Greenberg, in a post-postmodernist age, readers might be more receptive to von Kleist's melange of the legalistic, the traditional, and the fantastic. I found Kohlhaas's determination for his claim on two horses to be vindicated, leading from serving legal writs to proclaiming himself the viceroy of the archangel Michael as his followers set cities aflame, and culminating in his acceptance of the death penalty with his refusal to disclose a prophecy of a dynasty's doom -- I found all this absorbing and provocative!

#Books #HeinrichVonKleist #MichaelKohlhaas #GermanLiterature #Novellas #NineteethCenturyLiterature
#RomanticLiterature

Image -- On the Gallows, from Woodcuts for Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas -- 1953 -- Jacob Pins: Jerusalem Print Workshop -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I'm not sure I will ever find the mood, patience or time to sit down and write again, so I felt it was high time to give my stuff a place on the shelf! The book contains all my better than average short stories, novellettes and novellas with a a short authors blurb as tidbits/curiosa for each of them!

https://amazon.com/dp/B0FLD63WYD

#book #writing #selfpublishing #indieWriter #Indieauthor #author #scifi #ScienceFiction #shortstories #novellas #novelettes

I have never read anything by Heinrich von Kleist.

Should I start with "Michael Kohlhaas"?

https://www.publicbooks.org/the-kleist-we-need/

#Literature #HeinrichVonKleist #GermanLiterature #MichaelKohlhaas
#Novellas #Books

I've been reading all of this year's Hugo-nominated novellas (only one left to go!) and it turns out I just really, really love this format.

#reading #novellas #hugoawards

😍 #MMRomance
🌠 #Fantasy
🏡 #UrbanFantasy
🪄 #MagicRealism
Check out a collection of #queer #novels, #novellas and #shortstories
#LGBT #books
Visit https://kevinklehr.com/

Do you need a short, fluffy feel good romance to lift your mood? About a girl that falls for a sweet and insecure guy that dresses like a bumble bee and has a fairy garden!?

I got you: https://books2read.com/b/mZAKp3

#writing #novellas #romance #selfpromo #indieauthor

MARVELOUSLY TRIPPY HORROR novella juxtaposes the familiar and the strange in unexpected, powerful ways. This one will haunt you. B PLUS

https://ghoulish.rip/product/familiar/

@bookstodon

#book #Books #bookreview #bookreviews #bookstodon #fiction #novella #novellas #horror #supernatural #SmallPressSunday

In my new interview with author Premee Mohamed, she explains how her collection of dark fantasy novelettes and a novella, "One Message Remains" came together, as well as why they share the same secondary world.
https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-one-message-remains-author-premee-mohamed/
📖🖊️
. . . . . . . . . . .
#PremeeMohamed #PremeeMohamedInterview #PremeeMohamedOneMessageRemains #PremeeMohamedOneMessageRemainsInterview #Books #Reading #AuthorInterview #AuthorInterviews #BookTok #Fantasy #DarkFantasy #SecondaryWorldFantasy #Novellas #Novelettes

Currently Reading: The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens (A beginner friendly look into digital preservation.)

Wanna Finish: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Almost done with this sci fi novella. I'm HOOKED.)

Next Up: Future by Tommi Mutsuri (Love me some sci fi)

#books #libraries #digitalpreservation #comics #novellas

A GHOSTLY CHRISTMAS MYSTERY set in a medieval British abbey is delicately drawn and filled with vivid detail. Short, but richly memorable. B PLUS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9Y3YN7T?geniuslink=true&tag=bk00010a-20

@bookstodon

#book #Books #bookreview #bookreviews #fiction #novella #novellas #historicalfiction #medieval #supernatural #ghoststories #mystery #mysteries #SelfPublishedSunday

I've read some of the novellas in the list.

"I particularly love science fiction and fantasy novellas which is why I’m creating this list and I hope you discover your great next read from here. From dystopian futures to epic quests, these novellas offer a rich blend of genres, with both standalone and novella series included in this list."

https://uwadis.com/science-fiction-fantasy-novellas-to-add-to-your-reading-list/

#Books #Stories #Novellas #SFF

@iyamwhoiyam Have you read anything by Nnedi Okorafor? I enjoyed her novella Binti. There are two others in the series that I really need to go track down.

If you like scifi with a noir bent and a splash of sapphic romance, Malka Older's Mimicking of Known Successes is a good one to check out.

#scifi #books #novellas

#WhatIf?: 8 #ThoughtProvoking #Books that Explore the #Possibilities

I’ve compiled a list of eight books — ranging from #novellas to #collections to #novels — that hone in on “what if” and tell a #story in a way that #hovers closely to this #particular #thoughtexperiment.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Entertainment #TheArts #Literature #Books #Reading #Representation #Culture

https://bookriot.com/what-if-books/