5 Best Short Novels That You Must Read
A list of the 5 best short novels that you must read. These novels are under 200 pages. Check out the booklist.
1. Pedro Paramo
Within its brevity, determined by rigor and expressive concentration, Pedro Páramo synthesizes most of the themes that have always interested Mexicans, that national mystery that Juan Rulfo’s talent has managed to condense through the everyday inhabitants of Comala, a region already inscribed in universal literary mythology.
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2. Cloven Viscount
In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bisected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. When the two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, there’s no telling the lengths each will go to win.
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3. The Awakening
First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman’s emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman’s abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threaten to consume her.
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4. The Death of Ivan Ilyich
‘It is only a bruise’ A carefree Russian official has what seems to be a trivial accident… One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics’ huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries – including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.
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5. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Masked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this “autobiography” purports to be a candid account of its narrator’s private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgment of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience, an African-American. Written by the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in its depiction of turn-of-the-century New York, anticipates the social realism of the Harlem Renaissance writers.
