Tag Archives: Novella

BOOKS: “A Horse’s Tale” by Mark Twain

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A Horse's TaleA Horse’s Tale by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Project Gutenberg Page

Among the lesser-known works of Twain, A Horse’s Tale mixes an epistolary by a military officer at a remote outpost with dialogues between animals of the post (principally the protagonist, a horse called Soldier Boy.) The principal subject of the epistolary is a precocious girl who lives at the outpost and who is adored by all as the one soft, sweet creature in a world of warfighting men and their animals. The conversations between animals offer the most amusing portion of this book, largely for the fun being poked at humanity’s expense.

In its best moments, this novella is intensely touching or hilarious. However, it does suffer from inconsistency of pacing and tone.

If you enjoy Mark Twain’s humor and storytelling, this novella is well worth reading. If you’re primarily a reader of present-day genre / commercial fiction, it probably won’t be your thing.

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BOOKS: “Letters from a Seducer” by Hilda Hilst

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Letters from a SeducerLetters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Pushkin Press Classics

Release Date: May 27, 2025

This is an upcoming English translation of a 1991 novella from Brazilian author, Hilda Hilst, from what has been called her “obscene cycle.” It is mostly an epistolary novella in which a man, Karl, writes his sister, Cordelia, informing her about his recent sexual adventures and attempting to coax a confession out of her about her own activities long in the past. We never see any replies from Cordelia. (And that is part of what makes the book fascinating.) The only indication of her responses that we get are Karl’s references to Cordelia’s comments from her last letter in his present letter. However, we can’t necessarily be certain that even those occasional suggestions of dialog represent the truth.

To understand why one might have doubt, one must be aware of what else is going on in this book. There is one other narrative voice, and that is of Stamatius. Stamatius is in socio-economic terms the opposite of Karl. Karl being of the gentlemanly class — his behavior and letters to his sister notwithstanding — and Stamatius is a starving artist (a writer, to be precise.) The two men speak of each other, though always in deprecating terms. However, there’s reason to think the two men might be one. Stamatius, while condemning Karl’s sex obsession, also mostly engages in tales of his own sexual adventures as well as presenting those of others. In fact, the end of this novella is a collection of short vignettes of the nature one might see in a smutty letter magazine, only better (and sometimes poetically) written.

By the author’s own description, this novella is intentionally pornographic. While the same thing is said of Hilst’s The Obscene Madame D I did not find that book particularly graphic or sex-centric. This book, however, is quite graphic and if one took away references to sexual activities
nothing of substance would remain. (Not true of The Obscene Madame D.)

I found this book to be intriguing, despite the fact that it is quite sloppily arranged (presumably on purpose,) but it does present some splendid use of language (at least in this translation — the original is in Brazilian Portuguese) and character psychology.

I’d recommend this book for readers of literary fiction who don’t mind plotlessness and pornographicness.

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BOOKS: “The Obscene Madame D” by Hilda Hilst

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The Obscene Madame DThe Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Pushkin Classics

Release Date: May 27, 2025

This strange novella features a lot of stream-of-consciousness exchanges between the lead and her common-law spouse / lover. Hille, the protagonist, is a woman who’s decided to withdraw from her normal life and live a celibate, hermetic existence in a recess under the stairs of the home she shares with Ehud (her lover / long-time partner.)

It is a thought-provoking and philosophical work and will be most of interest to readers who like such books. On the other hand, it isn’t likely to have much appeal for readers of commercial fiction. It’s not story-driven and isn’t even deeply character-driven. [Except in the sense of showing thought processes that encourage the reader to drill down into the character’s psyche.] This book has been placed in the genre of (and titled as) erotica (or even pornography,) but I would say that it is much less accurately defined as such than other works of that category, including Hilst’s “Letters from a Seducer.” This isn’t to say the book doesn’t use graphic language or mention past sexual activity, but it’s not erotic at the core. It’s not shy about sex or “vulgar language” by any means, but it is a book about a woman who has given up sex along with other activities of ordinary life.

Ultimately, I’d recommend this book for readers of psychological and philosophical literary fiction. It is not intensely readable as a story and is not intensely erotic as erotica, but it does keep a curious person wondering about the motives and future of Hille.

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BOOKS: “Gothic Tales” by Marquis de Sade [Trans. by Margaret Crossland]

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Gothic TalesGothic Tales by Marquis de Sade
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Release Date: September 3, 2024

This collection of short fiction is an excellent entry point for the reader wishing to be introduced to the philosophy and literary stylings of the Marquis de Sade. It is less visceral and explicitly violent than the works for which Sade is most famous (i.e. Justine, 120 Days of Sodom, and Philosophy in the Boudoir.) While it does deal in libidinal issues throughout and has a few stories that are explicitly erotica (notably the last couple pieces,) it never ventures up to or over whatever thin line separates erotica from pornography.

While all the pieces share Sade’s signature philosophy and interests, it is in other ways a quite diverse collection of writings. The first piece, “Eugenie De Franval,” is a novella that takes up about half the book, and it is followed by a piece that, in today’s parlance, might be called flash fiction, “The Horse-Chestnut Flower.” Pieces such as “Eugenie De Franval” and “Florville and Courval” are tragedies while the comedies include: “Emilie De Tourville,”[granted with grim elements] “The Husband Who Played Priest,” “Room for Two,” and “The Self-Made Cuckold.” Those last three – as well as “The Horse-Chestnut Flower”– are comedic in a modern sense, not just the literary sense.

I can’t say how much of the difference in tone and intensity of these pieces from Sade’s other stories is owed to the selected source material and how much is owed to translation and editorial decisions, but it makes for a read that is more intriguing in story and less shocking and disturbing than many other translations of Sade’s work.

I enjoyed these stories. They had many clever twists and turns that I don’t recall experiencing in Sade’s novels. Several stories rely on a great deal of deus ex machina coincidences, but I think that works just fine — particularly in the more humorous stories. I’d highly recommend this for readers looking to ease into the work of the Marquis de Sade.

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BOOKS: A Double-Barreled Detective Story by Mark Twain

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A Double Barrelled Detective StoryA Double Barrelled Detective Story by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This novella is Mark Twain’s satirical jab at the whole Sherlock Holmes concept. In particular, it pokes fun at a detective who eschews everything supernatural in favor of cold rationality, but who produces results so impossible that they are themselves supernatural.

The story has two temporally disjointed parts that almost seem like independent stories until the very end when all is tied up. (Holmes only appears in the second part.) This works nicely for parody of Holmesian detective fiction as it’s an approach that was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on occasion — e.g. in A Study in Scarlet. The first part tells the tale of a woman who is treated foully by Jacob Fuller, the husband she eloped with but who harbored resentment towards her father, a man Fuller believed felt wasn’t good enough for his daughter. The woman makes her son, named Archy Stillman, promise that he will track down Fuller and make the man’s life a living hell.

The second part revolves around a murder that seems to be independent of the case described above, the killing of a man named Flint Buckner. Here Sherlock Holmes, who happens to be in town visiting his nephew – Fetlock Jones, “solves” the case only to be shown to be entirely and humiliatingly wrong by Archy Stillman using only a superior sense of smell and basic observation of the facts (with no elaborated inductions.)

While I never had anything against the Sherlock Holmes stories — in fact, I enjoyed them all — I did find Twain’s satire amusing and compelling as a story. [And it’s true that Arthur Conan Doyle did regularly strain credulity — that’s what made Holmes an intriguing character.]

Well worth reading.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

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The Torrents of SpringThe Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This novella is atypical of Hemingway’s work in several ways. It’s one of his earlier works of fiction, so it may stand to reason that his style and genre preferences weren’t yet set. The book parodies certain works and authors and satirizes the conceits and affectations seen in some popular writers of the day. Not that Hemingway’s work is otherwise devoid of humor, but it rarely plays the central role that it does herein. The story also has plot points that feel surreal in their absurdity, which is a variation from Hemingway’s usual dramatic realism. The novella also features a number of fourth wall breaks in the form of “Notes to the Reader.”

The book combines two storylines, each featuring a different worker at a pump factory in a Michigan town. Scripps O’Neill is a writer who comes to town after wandering away from his home down a train line after his wife left him. Scripps goes native in the town, getting a job at the pump factory and marrying a local woman, but he’s perpetually restless. Yogi Johnson is already an experienced worker when Scripps arrives, and he’s shaped by his experience in World War I, which other characters continually question amongst themselves. He ends up wandering out of town down the train tracks in a way that echoes Scripps’ arrival.

The book is funny and quirky and oddly engaging. Some of the humor would probably land better for those familiar with the pretentious writers that were the book’s target, but even if one isn’t familiar with the literature of the era, one will come away with an understanding of how Hemingway viewed said writers.

I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it for readers of American Literature.


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BOOK REVIEW: The Neil Gaiman Library, Vol. 3 by Neil Gaiman

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The Neil Gaiman Library Volume 3The Neil Gaiman Library Volume 3 by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Out: June 1, 2021

 

This series collects short fiction of Neil Gaiman and presents it via the medium of the graphic novel. While there are four works listed, because two of these works contain multiple stories, there are actually eight stories contained in this volume. The selection is diverse both in terms of genre and artistic style. With respect to genre, the stories cut across fairy tale, fantasy, horror, supernatural, and tales of the weird. The artistic styles range from art nouveau to comic strip style. While this is the third volume, the included stories all stand on their own, and so there is no necessity to have read previous volumes. Because Gaiman draws heavily on fairy tale source material, parents might assume these are kid-friendly stories, but you should check them out first yourself as “Snow, Glass, Apples” and “The Daughter of Owls” both present somewhat sexually explicit content (the former both graphically and with respect to story events and the latter only with respect to story,) and while the horror stories are pretty calm as horror stories go, they are still works of horror.

“Snow, Glass, Apples” is a dark take on the princess-centric fairy tale. It imagines a vampiric young nymph who appears as challenger to the Queen. This is probably the most visually impressive work, being illustrated in a style that mixes art nouveau with Harry Clark’s stain glass artworks. It is definitely not the run-of-the mill graphic novel, graphically speaking. The art is exceptionally detailed and stunning.

“The Problem with Susan and Other Stories”: As the title suggests, this is one of the two multi-story entries in the collection. The titular main story features a retired Professor who is plagued by Narnia-like dreams, and who receives a visit from a reporter for a college paper. The art for this one is much more reminiscent of the typical graphic novel of today. There are three other stories included. “Locks,” the comic strip-esque illustrated story, is a take on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as it’s being told to – and imagined by – a little girl. “October in the Chair” imagines a kind of story competition taking place around a campfire by anthropomorphized “months.” It’s a bit more artistically rendered than the other stories in this [sub-] collection (although that may have to do with the dark tone that is used to reinforce that the stories are being told in the middle of the night in the middle of a woods.) The final story is a brief, but artistically dense, story that imagines a day in which everything goes wrong at once.

The sixth story, “Only the End of the World Again,” revolves around a man / werewolf who wakes up to find that he has clearly turned in the preceding night. The tale is set in a small and remote village, where everyone seems to know everything about everyone, and it doesn’t shock the man when select people let slip that they know his secret. As the story unfolds, it’s clear that the man / werewolf is caught up in something bigger than his own tragedy.

The last entry is a two-parter. The first is one of my favorite Neil Gaiman short stories; entitled, “The Price,” it offers an answer to the question of why some indoor / outdoor cats constantly come home battered and bleeding. The second story, “The Daughter of Owls,” revolves around “the baby left on the church steps” plot mechanism. Because the girl is enveloped in owl accoutrements, she is shunned by the village and forced into exile at a dilapidated former abbey. Both of these stories have a more brush-painted style that the usual graphic novel.

I enjoyed this collection immensely. While not all of the stories were new to me, the way they were illustrated shone a new light on the familiar tales. All of the stories are masterfully crafted and illustrated. While Gaiman draws heavily on well-known fairy tales, there is nothing banal about these stories. I’d highly recommend this book, even if you’ve read some of the stories already.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth

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The Prague OrgyThe Prague Orgy by Philip Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This novella is sold independently, but is also included with “Zuckerman Bound,” a collected trilogy of books written by Philip Roth that includes: “The Ghost Writer,” “Zuckerman Unbound,” and “The Anatomy Lesson.” These books center on a fictional character, Nathan Zuckerman, who is a novelist bearing some resemblance to Roth, himself. The trilogy is from the early / mid 1980’s and “The Prague Orgy” functions as an epilogue to the series, although there’s no problem reading it as a standalone story.

In this short and simple tale, Zuckerman meets with an exiled Czech novelist, Sisovsky, in New York. While they are conversing, Sisovsky mentions that his father wrote a series of stories in Yiddish. Zuckerman becomes intrigued by these stories, especially as Sisovsky suggests they are better than anything Sisovsky, himself, has written. When Zuckerman asks about the whereabouts of the stories and why Sisovsky hasn’t had them published, the latter tells him that they are with his ex-wife in Prague. Sisovsky suggests that Zuckerman could probably talk this ex-wife, Olga, into giving up the manuscripts.

Zuckerman goes to Prague to speak with Olga. As Sisovsky suggested, Olga is a bit of a nymphomaniac, and immediately proceeds to try to get busy with Zuckerman. She is also interested in a more official relationship so that she can cross the Iron Curtain. The bulk of the story revolves around Zuckerman trying to fend off advances and get his hands on the manuscripts so that he can bring them back to be published before they – like so many stories of Central European Jews – are lost forever.

Being set in Cold War Central Europe, communist paranoia and spying play a major role, and – apropos of its Prague setting – this takes a form reminiscent of that seen in the works of Kafka (there is a sense of looming danger, but one isn’t quite sure how seriously one should take it.) In its most direct interpretation, the title reflects the idea that one has a bohemian artistic crowd who have nothing to do but engage in sexual hedonism in Prague because they can’t express themselves openly under a Communist regime – i.e. sexual promiscuity is the only outlet to be shocking that’s allowed.

This is was an amusing and compelling read, and I’d recommend it for fiction readers — particularly if one has an interest in Cold War fiction.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

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The Great God PanThe Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This speculative fiction novella mixes horror and sci-fi in a genre-bending work of intrigue. When I started the book, I was surprised to learn that it was from the last decade of the 19th century. The opening chapter, which is what I credit as science fiction, presents an argument that reality as we know it is just a veneer beyond which we cannot experience, and it’s stated not unlike what one would hear in today’s cutting-edge science and philosophical discussions. (e.g. It wasn’t greatly removed from what one might hear from Donald Hoffman, for example.) The mad scientist of the opening chapter proposes that he can, with “minor” neurosurgery [to the extent there is such a thing,] open the doors of perception to make available what lies beyond our reality. We are left to think that he has only succeeded in a lobotomization.

The rest of the book is more the Victorian Era horror that one is likely to hear the story described as. We are introduced to a series of mysteries that will gradually be tied together and related back to the book’s opening. A gentleman is approached by a beggar who – it turns out – was his classmate and should have been a well-to-do landowner, but who reported being ruined by having fallen in with the wrong woman – a not unusual story until one delves into the particulars. We further learn that a man had been found dead at this couple’s property before the woman disappeared. Later there are a series of murders that have a certain demographic of society all atwitter.

Despite the shortness of the work, it does present jumping perspectives (not within chapters, but between them.) However, it’s not hard to follow, though it’s a bit jarring when the first PoV change hits because it involves a new cast of characters and it isn’t clear how the events tie together. The reader who sticks with it will be benefited by the shift.

This book was widely panned in its day, more for its shocking sexuality than its horror elements. However, it should be pointed out that the author uses strategic ambiguity for this matter, so there is no graphic sexual content. For example, one character may whisper in another’s ear the acts of depravity, but the reader is left to fill in the blanks according to the twistedness of their own particular psyche. For readers who enjoy the freedom to fill in the blanks, this is an interesting approach – others might not like the withholding of detail.

I enjoyed this book. It’s readable, despite the era from which it came. As I said, in some sense, it’s ahead of its time. The non-linear plotting builds the up the intrigue nicely. I’d highly recommend it for readers of weird stories, horror, or speculative fiction.

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BOOK REVIEW: Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain

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Tom Sawyer, DetectiveTom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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The adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn continue in this novella as the duo travels to visit Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas in Arkansas. On the riverboat, they meet an old acquaintance who they didn’t know was still alive, the twin of a man who still lives near Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas. He tells them how he’s in a bind because he conspired in a diamond theft with two partners, and subsequently swindled the two by making off with the diamonds. The reason he’s headed home is because he figures he can hide out there as long as he makes himself look like his twin, as long as no one sees the two twins together, he can play like he’s his brother. While Tom and Huck agree to be helpful, the last time they see this man, he’s jumped ship and is being followed by the two men, and Tom and Huck assume he’s a goner.

In time Tom and Huck arrive at Aunt Sally’s. Shortly thereafter a man goes missing, the twin of the diamond thief. Eventually, evidence mounts that the murderer is none other than Uncle Silas. Despite the fact that Silas has been a little off, Tom doesn’t believe his kind uncle, a pastor, is capable of such a feat. However, Silas confesses, having thwacked the man on the head, he believes that the man must have died from it. Testimony convinces Silas that he must have gone out to bury the man in an act of incredible somnambulism, and while he has no recollection of it, he believes it must be true.

When it comes to the trial, Tom sits in with the incompetent public defender, committed to proving Silas’s innocence — despite his Uncle’s vociferous admissions. At the last second, Tom does figure it out, and explains what really happened. He’s furthermore able to substantiate his claims using no more than the individuals in the courtroom. By the times he’s finished, even Uncle Silas acknowledges that he didn’t commit a murder.

This is a fine little mystery story, but what makes it really enjoyable is the first-person narration by Huck Finn. While Tom Sawyer does the brainwork to solve the crime, Huck offers a telling that is humorous and whimsical.

If you like “Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huck Finn” don’t miss this follow-up.

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