the.com/novella
too big to mug for a quote, too small to bludgeon you with its spine
means A work of prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, usually telling a single focused story in a compact, unified arc.
from Straight from Italian novella, meaning 'a new little thing' or 'a piece of news' — itself the feminine of novello, 'new,' which traces back to Latin novus. In Renaissance Italy a novella was a short tale, the kind Boccaccio strung together by the dozen in his Decameron; the word was a cousin of the same root that later gave English the full-grown 'novel.' So the novella and the novel are siblings descended from 'news' — both started life as something new worth telling.
- word count
- roughly 17,500 to 40,000 words
- italian roots
- means a new little thing, a news item
- famous one
- Kafka's Metamorphosis is technically a novella
- hard sell
- too long for magazines, too short for shelves
- its power
- one idea, no subplots, no escape
heart of darkness — joseph conrad's 1899 novella following marlow's journey up the congo river
the metamorphosis — franz kafka's 1915 novella where gregor samsa wakes up as an insect