Results by title
20 books match the query 'Novella'
Brezhat
A NovellaMichael Holt
University of Alabama Press, 2027
Three Sams, one impossible building, and a mystery echoing across worlds, lifetimes, and dreams.
Brezhat is a thrilling, puzzle-like novella that unfolds across three overlapping worlds, all occurring within the same haunted building. In one timeline, the building is a school where children's dreams are recorded. In another, an orphanage tied to a glass factory. In the third, a postapocalyptic ruin inhabited by a community of eccentric survivors.
Within its shifting halls live three versions of the same person, all named Sam. Though separated by time and circumstance, the Sams share dreams, sensations, and fleeting encounters that bind their lives together in unsettling ways. As they wander through forgotten corridors and forbidden rooms, the Sams undertake tasks both ordinary and uncanny. They deliver life-saving serum, reassemble the body of a broken friend, talk with the dead, and bury dead mice. Along the way, they are guided, taught, and sometimes misled by an unforgettable cast of adults: teachers, nuns, scientists, artists, a librarian, and the inscrutable Mr. Jones, a janitor who seems to exist outside of time altogether. Threaded through each timeline is the shadow of a former friend whose acts of violence echo across worlds, causing old wounds to recur in new forms. Blending speculative fiction, psychological insight, and gothic atmosphere, Brezhat is a mesmerizing novella steeped in mystery, unraveling the stories we inherit, the selves we might have been, and the strange ways pain reverberates across a lifetime.
Brides in the Sky
Stories and a NovellaCary Holladay
Ohio University Press, 2019
Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood, in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. In the title story, two women in 1850s Virginia marry brothers who promptly uproot them to follow the Oregon Trail west, until an unexpected shift of allegiance separates the sisters forever. Elsewhere in the book, a young boy’s kidnapping ignites tensions in a sorority house; frontier figure Cynthia Ann Parker struggles upon her return to her birth community from the Comanche people with whom she’s lived a full life; and in a metafictional twist, a gothic tale resonates in the present. In the novella, “A Thousand Stings,” three sisters come of age in the 1960s over a long summer of small-town scandal and universal stakes. These are just some of the lives, shaped by migrations, yearning, and the long shadows of myth, that Holladay creates. She crafts them with subtle humor, a stunning sense of place, and an unerring eye for character.
Brother's Ghost
A NovellaStephen Spotte
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Cactus Thorn
(A Novella)Mary Austin
University of Nevada Press, 1994
Death of a Confederate Colonel
Civil War Stories and a NovellaPat Carr
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Disability
A NovellaCris Mazza
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Redefining strength, one truth at a time.
Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute, evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system are all disabled. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift. They're working within a system where money for therapy is only continued if therapy shows improvement--and yet the state-paid therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it is up to the minimum-wage caregivers to "see" and chart important improvements, thus keeping the therapy program alive.
Blinded in their own way by their pet-like adoption of favorite patients, Teri and Cleo struggle to remain both optimistic and realistic. As their personal failures mount--and even transpose or emulate the travesties within the state ward--Teri and Cleo, with their own unseen "disabilities" in dealing with their lives and pasts, react harshly to the breakdown in the emotional balancing act.
Drain Songs
Stories and a NovellaGrant Maierhofer
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Drain Songs gathers five stories and a novella focused on the many trials of modern life—addiction and depression, mania and disorder, attempts and failure at keeping the worst at bay. Grant Maierhofer’s stories focus on characters in varying states of disarray and stuckness, continuing his literary project of analyzing lives on the fringes of sanity and society. The novella “Drain Songs” is a harrowing narrative focused squarely on addiction and recovery, twelve-step programs, and codependency.
In all of these tales, Maierhofer takes a bee’s-eye view of protagonists from all walks of life, from the working class to the academy, from janitors to professors, embodying the commonalities of men and women struggling with very fundamental elements of survival, perspective, and identity—attempts formal and informal to contend with the trials that forever engage and perplex humanity.
His evocative prose conveys both despair and resignation as well as stultifying, brain-deadening routine and repetition. Still, these stories transcend angst and tilt toward agony and ecstasy and the hope of redemption.
Dust Devils
A NovellaRobert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1997
Faith in Disguise
A NovellaMayra Santos-Febres; Translated from the Spanish by John A. Mundell
Vanderbilt University Press, 2026
Greetings from Cutler County
A Novella and StoriesTravis Mulhauser
University of Michigan Press, 2005
In one northern Michigan community the lives of desperate small-town dreamers are examined through an ensemble cast as earnest as they are outrageous, and as compelling as they are heartbreaking. The lovers, crooks, failures, and survivors of Cutler County are so flawed and genuine you can't help rooting for them-no matter how foolish or hopeless their pursuits may seem.
The stories take place in Cutler County, Michigan. Most of the characters are young men who think of themselves as losers and outsiders. Short on cash, popularity, and the ambition needed for success, they nevertheless are able to examine their failings with the self-knowing humor and resignation of the perpetually thwarted ne'er-do-well.
The stories are inseparable from the stark shoreline of their Lake Michigan settings-the cavernous woods and vast inland lakes that shape life in northern Michigan-and create a landscape as rugged and dramatic as youth itself. Greetings from Cutler County explores the common triumphs and tragedies of coming of age, while providing a rationale and humor that is uniquely and unforgettably its own.
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature
A Novella and StoriesDiane Williams
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Saint Christopher
A NovellaJosé Maria De Eça De Queirós
Tagus Press, 2015
Sweet Hope
a novellaJudson N. Hout
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013
The Boys from Possum Grape
A novellaJudson N. Hout
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013
Set in the days of small, local banks when embarrassing entrepreneurs were the one family in town who bought a new car every year—those cars everyone else called ‘gunboats—and the bad guys came with black hats, this rollicking send-up of stupid criminals who even Barnie Fife could have outwitted makes for belly-laughs while reading and memories that will bring smiles to readers’ faces.
The Disappearance
A Novella and StoriesIlan Stavans
Northwestern University Press, 2008
The Loss
A Novella and Two Short StoriesVladimir Makanin
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the character's lives. In the novella The Loss, Pekalov, a drunkard and dreamer obsessed with the idea of building a tunnel under the Ural River, disappears in a ditch while working and is made a saint by the people of his village. "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin" tells the story of what happens when one man becomes remarkably lucky while the other loses all his luck.
The Turn
A NovellaRachel Feder
Northwestern University Press, 2026
A contemporary gothic delving into the power of unmoored lust and familial bonds
When Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, she rapidly becomes aware of strange happenings orbiting the family and their children, Quinn and Thebes. After the father becomes estranged and the mother disappears into the night with only one child, Baxter is left utterly lost and in charge of the baby, Thebes, as she struggles to make sense of the bizarre occurrences within the family, the house, and even her own body. But the unnatural occurrences are far from over, and as Baxter stumbles in the dark to protect the child, something sinister stalks the night, looking to sink in its teeth.
For fans of gothic classics such as The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla, The Turn is an eerie and magnificent modern gothic tale about the monstrous bond of love between caregiver and child.
Through the Boondocks and Back
A NovellaAlex DiFrancesco
Northwestern University Press, 2027
A queer, rollicking retelling of The Odyssey
Zane Viaggio’s life has been fraught since leaving New York City for Cleveland. Uprooted and missing his life in the city, he escapes into parties and pills. When he wakes up vomiting several days in a row, he’s convinced by his three drag queen roommates and his best trans-femme friend to get a pregnancy test, learning that not only is he pregnant, but pregnant in an Ohio that has just outlawed abortion. Zane must then embark on an epic journey around Lake Erie and its surrounding towns on a stolen jet ski to find the man who impregnated him, get the money to go back to New York City for an abortion, and get his life back to normal. In this queer and trans retelling of The Odyssey, Zane encounters all sorts of strange and challenging characters—including one-eyed cats, force-femmed prophets, and his own chosen family—who help him discover that, perhaps, finding home is the greatest journey of all.
Time of the Rabies
A NovellaRobert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 2000
Walking
A NovellaThomas Bernhard
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Thomas Bernhard is “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner); “one of the century’s most gifted writers” (Newsday); “a virtuoso of rancor and rage” (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, it is only in recent years that he has gained a devoted cult following in America.
A powerful, compact novella, Walking provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes—illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships—that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Walking records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, Walking provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.