About the novella

 Because storytelling is everything. It's the basis of our culture and our artistic forms, from novels to films, via history writing and even essays. 

So here's an interesting read about writing and specifically about one genre I too particularly affectionate, the novella.

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New Yorker Novellas

“Ibelieve the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant,” Ian McEwan wrote a few years back on our Web site. The novel, he explained, “is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life. . . . But I could at least conceive of the perfect novella. Or, rather, imagine one approaching perfection like an asymptotic line in coördinate geometry.” A short story can try to capture something—a moment, an idea, a joke, a heartbreaking fact of life. A novel can try to capture everything, to be all-encompassing. So what does a novella do? It leaves things out, jettisoning, as McEwan wrote, its “quintuple subplots and swollen midsections.” The novella is not, usually, an expanded story. Rather, it is a contracted novel, in which the omissions cover much ground. It is more ambitious than a story, denser and more gemlike than a novel. In the Fiction Department at The New Yorker, we are often frustrated by novellas: they can do so much, and yet we can’t do much with them. There simply isn’t enough space in a weekly magazine with a mandate to cover the waterfront of news, politics, and culture. To ease that frustration, we are introducing an online-only feature: the New Yorker Novella. A few times a year, we will publish on newyorker.com a work of fiction that we weren’t able to fit into print but couldn’t imagine letting go of. This week, Callan Wink’s novella, “In Hindsight,”launched the series. A portrait of a woman living out her life in unforgiving physical and emotional terrain, “In Hindsight”—despite its length—feels sparse and sharp; years pass between sections, and yet its narrative, from a brutal act at the start to a moment of generosity at the end, is undeniably complete. In honor of the New Yorker Novella series, we take a look back here at a few of the longer works of fiction that have made it into the magazine over the years. —Deborah Treisman, Fiction Editor