In Claire Messud’s acclaimed novel The Woman Upstairs, her fascinating character of Nora was held up as a perfect example of an unreliable narrator, to the point where some readers even questioned her sanity. In The Hunters, a collection of two novellas, Messud seems to be dissecting the very idea of what a narrator is.…
Inspired by #NovellaNovember, championed by the brilliant Poppy of Poppy Peacock Pens, I had a look through the 746 with one thing in mind. Length. I was searching for a novella I could read and review before the end of the month and came across Tinkers by Paul Harding which clocks in…
Tolstoy, who is so often associated with the big, the broad and the epic in terms of his writing, was also a master of the intimate and the personal, as seen in the perfectly formed novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Where a novel like War and Peace is cinematic in its exploration of humanity,…
The full title of this collection is The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares: Novellas and Stories of Unspeakable Dread. Joyce Carol Oates might not seem like the first port of call if you are in the mood for some unspeakable dread, but novels such as Zombie, My Sister, My Love and We Were the Mulvaneys all…
Read more No 700 The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates
