Two scrappy small presses have recent books that display the form’s limitations and possibilities. As a result, novellas don’t typically win literary awards or appear on bestseller lists.ĭespite this low profile (and because writers and readers often like things that most publishers don’t), the novella endures, flourishing in the scrub. Not many people have marketed one, and few know how to do so effectively. Whereas both the short story and the novel are widely known forms with accompanying expectations, the novella isn’t as familiar. The literary equivalent of a tight half-hour of prestige TV, the novella - a complete work of prose fiction between 15,000 and 40,000 words, give or take - doesn’t get the love it deserves from contemporary publishing. This seems to be an ideal time for the novella to take a turn in the spotlight.
Brevity is no longer the soul of wit so much as the tiny window through which wit must leap, often to its death. Driven by digital communications, dominant forms of media are getting shorter. The average YouTube video is, according to the Pew Research Center, twelve minutes long meanwhile, the average retention rate fluctuates around 50 percent - meaning six minutes is a sweet spot for our hacked attention spans. Includes a reading group guide.We are living in an age of contraction. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. What she discovers will change her life forever.
Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship.
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