Includes bibliographical references (pages 373-416) and indexes.
Contents:
Introduction : Notes of a common reader -- Agostino / Alberto Moravia -- Animal farm : a fairy story / George Orwell -- Another Brooklyn / Jacqueline Woodson -- The awakening / Kate Chopin -- The ballad of the sad café / Carson McCullers -- Big boy leaves home / Richard Wright -- Bonjour tristesse / Françoise Sagan -- Candide, or optimism / Voltaire -- Charlotte's web / E. B. White -- A clockwork orange / Anthony Burgess -- The country girls / Edna O'Brien -- Death in Venice / Thomas Mann -- Dept. of speculation / Jenny Offill -- The dry heart / Natalia Ginzburg -- Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton -- Evil under the sun / Agatha Christie -- The fifth child / Doris Lessing -- The ghost writer / Philip Roth -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The hour of the star / Clarice Lispector -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- If Beale Street could talk / James Baldwin -- If this is a man [survival in Auschwitz] / Primo Levi -- July's people / Nadine Gordimer -- The lathe of heaven / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Lord of the flies / William Golding -- The lost daughter / Elena Ferrante -- The lover / Marguerite Duras -- Lucy / Jamaica Kincaid -- Maus I : a survivor's tale : my father bleeds history / Art Spiegelman -- Middle passage / Charles Johnson -- Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf -- The hours / Michael Cunningham -- The nickel boys / Colson Whitehead -- No one writes to the colonel / Gabriel García Marquez -- The old man and the sea / Ernest Hemingway -- On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan -- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- Oranges are not the only fruit / Jeanette Winterson -- Pale horse, pale rider / Katherine Anne Porter -- A pale view of hills / Kazuo Ishiguro -- Passing / Nella Larsen -- The perfect nanny / Leïla Slimani -- A portrait of the artist as a young man / James Joyce -- The postman always rings twice / James M. Cain -- The prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark -- The red badge of courage / Stephen Crane -- Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption / Stephen King -- The sailor who fell from grace with the sea / Yukio Mishima -- The stranger / Albert Camus -- Sula / Toni Morrison -- Surfacing / Margaret Atwood -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- Things fall apart / Chinua Achebe -- Tokyo Ueno station / Yu Miri -- Waiting for the barbarians / J. M. Coetzee -- We have always lived in the castle / Shirley Jackson -- Wilde Sargasso sea / Jean Rhys -- Afterword : What's not here -- My favorite fifteen great short books.
Summary:
Davis provides a guide to some of the best short novels of all time. The works span from the eighteenth century to the present day, covering multiple genres, cultures, and countries, and are arranged alphabetically by title. Each short (4-to-6 pages) profile includes the first lines of the work, a brief plot summery, information about the author, and Davis's opinion on why you should read the book-- and what you should read next. -- adapted from perusal of book
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.