Short Books

[Orang Utan]

My attention span isn’t what it was, and it’s affected my appetite for reading, so I’ve found myself reading more short novels.
Book I’ve enjoyed:
Gwendoline Riley - My Phantoms
Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
Sven Holm - Termush
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
Herman Melville - Bartleby The Scrivener
Max Porter - Lanny
Max Porter - Shy
Max Porter - Grief Is The Thing With Feathers
Zadie Smith - The Embassy Of Cambodia
Otessa Moshfegh - McGlue
Sven Lindqvist - Exterminate All The Brutes
Michel Faber - D: A Tale Of Two Worlds
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Rebecca Solnit - Men Explain Things To Me
Jonathan Ames - You Were Never Really Here
Emmanuel Carrère - The Adversary
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
And I keep meaning to get around to reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart Of A Dog

Any other suggestions? They don’t have to be novels. There’s a couple of non-fiction in the above list.

 

[wtfftw]

I enjoyed the Murderbot diaries. They're all pretty short. and Monk & Robot books by Becky Chambers were a little palate cleanse.

 

[JimW]

The Stone Book Quartet, Alan Garner. Four connected short novels. Real gem.

 

[May Kasahara]

Karin Tidbeck - Amatka

 

[JimW]

If non-fiction is OK, Confucius: The Secular As Sacred by Herbert Fingarette is a classic and aimed at the interested general reader.

 

[frogwoman]

Short stories rather than books and currently available on Kindle only, but anything by Kerry Richardson is worth reading

 

[Mattym]

Dostoyevsky- The Death of Ivan Ilyich

 

[Orang Utan]

Dostoyevsky- The Death of Ivan Ilyich

That’s Tolstoy, but Notes From Underground is one of my favourite short novels

 

[danny la rouge]

That’s Tolstoy

The one by Dostoyevsky is even shorter.

 

[maomao]

Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal. Only a quid on Foyles website.

 

[Throbbing Angel]

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Totally mental and about 125 pages

 

[Throbbing Angel]

First Love by Gwendoline Riley is also quite short

 

[Humberto]

M.R. James is good for short ghost stories.

 

[JimW]

There's The Tartar Steppe but maybe it's a bit too long to count, 200+ pages: Buzzati: The Tartar Steppe - The Modern Novel

 

[Winot]

Rental Person Who Does Nothing - Shoji Morimoto

 

[Humberto]

Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby jnr

Over 200 pages but is kind of split into 3 iirc.

 

[Mattym]

That’s Tolstoy, but Notes From Underground is one of my favourite short novels

Yes, sorry, Tolstoyevsky.

 

[Orang Utan]

Yes, sorry, Tolstoyevsky.

Easy to get grim beardy-weirdy Russkies mixed up innit

 

[Epona]

Richard Matheson is a good source of sci-fi type short novels (including I Am Legend, which I think is excellent and at 160 pages should fit the remit) and short stories.
If you're into that sort of thing you've probably already read a lot of his stuff though!

 

[Idaho]

Amnesia Moon by Johnathan Lethem