Like some other things Iāve been lucky enough to have published, The Flying Dutchman is a short work I chiseled out of a longer one. An updating of the classic romantic legend, itās the story of a young woman visited by a time-traveling pop star seeking the one woman he can love. The novella formānot novel, not short storyāseemed to work best for it. Itās been the right shape for some of the most famous stories of all time, from Heart of Darkness to To Kill a Mockingbird and beyond.
Iāve traveled through time myself to choose some other favorite novellas that meaningfully capture a period and place.
Mariette Navarroās 2025 work is part of an interesting recent sub-genre of austere European novellas set in an unspecified, unnerving near-future.
Coping with her fatherās dementia, a female shipās captain allows her male crew an unusual naked night swim. Afterwards, she realizes thereās a new, unregistered man aboard.
UltramarineĀ is absorbing, entranced, and psychologically rich; refreshing among current fiction, its ambiguity requires as much dream analysis as literary interpretation. Itās been superbly translated by Eve Hill-Agnus.
The metaphysically disorienting tale of a captain who loses control of her thinkingāand her crewāaboard a cargo ship in the Atlantic.
A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of UltramarineĀ has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she now manages a crew of twenty men and helms her own vessel. Uncharacteristically, one day, she allows her crew to cut the engines and swim in the deep open water. Returning from this moment of leisure, the crew of mariners no longer totals twenty men: now, they are twenty-one.
Speaking of psychoanalysis, like much of Stefan Zweigās work, FearĀ was written at the dawn of the Freudian era, in 1913 (though it wasnāt published until 1920).
A married upper-class woman is blackmailed by the working-class girlfriend of her lover, and while the tale of her panic is sometimes just an illustration of the then-new concept of the subconscious, itās riveting anyway.
In the fifties, it became the closest Roberto Rossellini ever came to making a film noir, with Ingrid Bergman.
A bourgeois housewife's affair is discovered, and a blackmailer turns her comfortable life into a nightmare of apprehension
Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother tedious after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover's former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband, meanwhile her husband seems to offer her numerous opportunities to confess and be forgiven. Irene is soon in the grip of agonizing fear. Written in the spring of 1913, and first published in 1920,ā¦
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New Yorkās wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, itās time to dig into the details and seeā¦
One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael Westās short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever writtenāhideous, poignant, horribly funny.
West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.
Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the "Best 100 English-language novels" by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song "Day of the Locusts" in homage and Matt Groening's Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes - actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it's theā¦
The Scottish author Muriel Sparkās specialty was short, mordant, corrosive novels, the best known being, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.Ā This one, published in 1970, was among her most striking.
A repressed womanās vacation during the free-loving sixties turns out to be a date with death she may have initiated: the question lingers after you finish.
It became a flawed yet fascinating 1974 film with Elizabeth Taylor at her mostāliterally and figurativelyāexposed.
Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday - in search of passionate adventure and sex. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination.
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New Yorkās Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as theā¦
In Rachel Seiffertās stunning 2001 novella set at the end of World War Two, a teenage girl leads her younger siblings through the ruins of a burning, defeated Germany, after the arrest of their Nazi parents.
This modern classic unearths something new from a tumultuous and much-dissected past. It redefines and gives new gravity to the term ācoming-of-age.ā
Donāt read it before bed, thoughāyou might be too upset to sleep.
Now a Major Motion Picture: in Lore, Rachel Seiffert powerfully examines the legacy of World War II on ordinary Germans--both survivors of the war and the generations that succeeded them. Ā It is spring of 1945, just weeks after the defeat of Germany. A teenage German girl named Lore has been left to fend for herself. Her parents have been arrested by the Allies, and she has four younger siblings to care for. Together, they set off on a harrowing journey to find their grandmother. As we follow Lore on a 500-mile trek through the four zones of occupation, Seiffert evokesā¦
For Olive, the teen years may be behind her, but her love for teen idol Fyfe Moreso remains as intense as ever. Fyfe, the shape-shifting superstar, has captivated millions in virtual arenas and filled Oliveās heart with both dreams of devotion and desire.
But Olive is about to uncover a shocking truth: Fyfe has lived many lives before. Like the sea captain from the classic romantic legend, doomed to wander the earth in search of his one true love.
In the tumultuous world of ancient Israel, Ahinoamāa fierce and unconventional Kenite womanāflees her family farm with her dagger-wielding father to join the ragtag band of misfits led by the shepherd-turned-warrior David ben Jesse.
As King Saul's treasonous accusations echo through the land, Ahinoam's conviction that David's anointing makes himā¦
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the deadāletters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.Ā
