After reading James A. McLaughlin's novella, "Bearskin," in the summer issue of the Missouri Review, and really liking it (still deciding whether to upgrade this to love), I have decided to try and list other lit mags that publish novellas.
I'm drawing blanks here. I know VQR publishes some longer stuff, and sometimes Glimmer Train, and, online, The King's English. A quick search on duotrope.com revealed a mag called, The Long Story (anyone read this?), and mentioned that A Public Space, among others, takes novellas as submissions. But honestly, I can't really remember reading another novella in a lit mag , other than "Bearskin," in a long long time, maybe ever. Maybe I just passed these stories over, not wanting to commit myself?
Yet novellas are usually my favorite stories in collections. I wonder what the difference is. From an editor's standpoint, I can see that it would be hard to give that many pages to one author when there is so much deserving work, but I wonder why my readerly attention span can't commit. Why do I have a hard time reading long stories in lit mags but not collections?
January 9, 2009
Novellas Love You But You Don't Love Novellas
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10 comments:
Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, Five Points, and One Story are all good for long stories too. I've heard of The Long Story, but (wrongly, apparently) though it was defunct for some reason.
Maybe with lit mags, you're reading with a desire to sample some different stories and to kind of jump around, but when you're reading an entire collection, you're more invested in that particular book and the author?
Epoch published An Upright Man by Holly Jones
Alaska Quaterly Review published the Animal Girl by John Fulton
Subtropics published a couple novellas
Gettysburg Review published All Through the House by Christopher Coake and A Day Meant to Do Less by Kyle Minor. Both were also in best American mystery stories
Missouri Review published Bearskin by James McLaughlin
Esquire and New Yorker used to publish novellas by Jim Harrison and Peter A. Taylor
Sewanee Review published Adultery by Andre Dubus but that was long ago
Texas Review published Poachers by Tom Franklin
Georgia Review published One of Star Wars One of Doom by Lee Abbott
Everything Alice Munro writes is practically a novella
@nate
Epoch published An Upright Man by Holly Jones
Alaska Quaterly Review published the Animal Girl by John Fulton
Subtropics published a couple novellas
Gettysburg Review published All Through the House by Christopher Coake and A Day Meant to Do Less by Kyle Minor. Both were also in best American mystery stories
Missouri Review published Bearskin by James McLaughlin
Esquire and New Yorker used to publish novellas by Jim Harrison and Peter A. Taylor
Sewanee Review published Adultery by Andre Dubus but that was long ago
Texas Review published Poachers by Tom Franklin
Georgia Review published One of Star Wars One of Doom by Lee Abbott
Everything Alice Munro writes is practically a novella
@nate
Hey, thanks for the nod to The King's English! I founded the journal precisely because print journals rarely print novellas, and the overwhelming majority of online journals (even the online versions of print journals) tend to ignore them as well.
I can't speak to your preference for reading them in collections vs. journals, but it's obviously an awkward length for publishers (and even making them available online isn't ideal, since nobody really wants to read lengthy material on screen). It's also an awkward length for writers, precisely because they're hard to publish. Yet I can attest that people keep writing them ... and some people (a few, anyway) will keep reading them.
I think writers get pressured into writing something longer if it starts to get around the 70 or 80 or 90 pg mark (longer than a Munro story but shorter than a novel). Which is sad, because each piece should dictate its own length, I think, and does.
Benjamin--sure thing.
Laura--Yeah, I guess those double issues One Story sometimes does.
The new issue of the Santa Monica Review has a novella by Greg Spatz.
Matthew - Yes, you're right: the market isn't kind to works of an in-between length, and authors sometimes try to expand work to fit a novel when it was better as a novella.
But the reverse is true, too, in my experience: writers often fail to cut novella-length work down to a shorter, more appropriate length. The extra space of a novella is liberating, especially for writers trying out their stride for the first time, but it's often unneeded.
I've twice thought stories were going to be novellas but they didn't end up as long as I'd expected.
Although--I really like stories that seem to contain as much "story stuff" as novels. I read somewhere that Hemingway said he put three novels into "Kilimanjaro," which I often think is his best story.
I agree wholeheartedly, Matthew. Many of the best stories are successful because they're so powerfully compressed. "Kilimanjaro's" an example; Isaac Babel's another writer who used that technique to good effect; and in a different mode, Mavis Gallant packs her stories -- not with incident, but with a depth of character hardly anybody matches.
It should be noted that science fiction magazines have always published novellas--the big pulps, Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction--publish one or two novellas in every issue (that's 12 issues a year).
New Genre (www.new-genre.com) publishes up to 14,000 words. Pretty long.
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