The novella is famously “pocket-sized,” and marketed as such, in the relatively rare case when a publisher feels whimsical enough to produce one. Crassly, it is a work of fiction which achieves that mystical, begrudging minimum page length that warrants its nestling between front and back covers all on its own. And we as modern readers (forgive the assumption) respond to it as a physical object the way we respond to almost anything that is a smaller version of something else: with a kind of simple, unintimidated affection, the result of our own enlargement in its presence maybe, with anticipatory amusement, with the hope of fun—but no real expectation of “awe.”
Being “fun-sized,” we want it when we want just a little something. Being “pocket-sized,” we keep it on us in case of boredom. It is dwarfed by the tomes on the nightstand. In fact, it has slipped between the mattress and bed frame and is lost—oh well. It does not concuss you when dropped on your head from a height. It is unsalable. It is ineligible for masterwork status.
Formally, it is my favorite mode of fiction. And so I want to dispute that the diminutive “la” indicates a minor achievement. That the novella is not an immature form, or a form of modesty, or a running out of steam I hope can be generally accepted. But if not the simple failing to reach, either maturity or for loftier artistic goals, and undertaken with something specific in mind, to achieve something specifically—what then? What is it for?
What makes the novella so wonderful, I think, is that it is a prolonged narrative—long enough to lose yourself in—that nonetheless you can read in its entirety, in a reasonable interval, with attention unbroken. You may enjoy it as a whole, and examine it immediately afterwards, with no slippage of memory. Because it remains intact. Because it is “human brain-sized.” It fits us, and on occasion, close to perfectly. To mix metaphors and organs: something smaller would leave you unsatisfied. A portion larger and you risk suffering from overindulgence. It feeds well your hungry eyes. It fills the mind-stomach pleasantly.
Speaking of nourishment, that historically the novella has been a vehicle for moralizing is easy enough to understand. A reader can tolerate only so much didacticism (no more than 40 thousand words), after which the book is customarily thrown across the room. This is not the project of all novellas, of course. And modern readers, I imagine, are suspicious of such a project and disinclined to didactic literature announcing itself as such. But is this not a worthy project? Can such a work be a joy?
Here are three books publishing this summer that engage with the aforementioned novella rubric, including its “moralizing” aspect (complementary), and which I recommend. That they play so freely in the same territory while maintaining total formal difference from one another also recommends them. They give a sense of the range of the novella form. They are exacting, ambitious, and instructive “smaller” works that mean to be what they are.
Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo (Soft Skull, 2025)
Fresh, Green Life is a novel 160 pages in length by Sebastian Castillo. Its time is spent half in examination of the narrator (Sebatián Castillo)’s idyllic, un-idyllic, misguided, haphazard, tender collegiate years as part of a small cohort of philosophy students in the tutelage of their disaffected, lazy, middling, lonely, unclean, full-of-shit, nonetheless better-versed and more advanced Professor, and half in anticipation of a New Year’s Eve reunion, years later, of all previously mentioned, but especially the once unavailable and now divorced Maria, at the aging Professor’s house in suburban Philadelphia. It is a tale told in the language of learning that suspects a gaping emptiness beneath all erudition. Its subject—as portrayed in the readings, musings, speeches, resolutions and vows of Sebatián—is the limits of Moral Philosophy with regards to the possibility of individual human betterment. Via Sebatián we are inclined to wonder: Does the life of contemplation not in-fact result in experience-naivety and lifeforce-crippling inaction? Isn’t there somewhere else a person should focus their efforts, somewhere out in the real world—the gym, for example? And who is all this improvement for anyway? Moral Philosophy may in fact be a trap, and yet Sebatián’s every trial must necessarily run the gauntlet of the philosophic tradition, must come into contact with all the great names, before it can be properly processed or at least buried away. And, uncomfortable or deeply uncomfortable, all improvement must be proved in the end, by presenting oneself before someone else who will form their own judgement, idealized or fucked as they themselves may be in one’s estimation. You will enjoy this novel(la) if you relish confronting delusions great and small, if you love philosophy, if you hate philosophy, if you revel in the language of erudition, if you suspect a gaping emptiness beneath all learning but hope very much to find something there.
Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House Press 2025)
The provocation of Patchwork, as with Comitta’s earlier The Nature Book, is supposed to be that it is not “authored” in the traditional sense, but stitched together from hundreds of texts, both obscure and well-known, spanning genres and historical epochs. But a book like this, in principle, shouldn’t trouble readers acquainted with other so-called “experimental” works deploying the technique of decoupage or assemblage. If there is any controversy with regard to The Nature Book, it should be surrounding the fact that it is a novel without any people in it— people being the novel’s primary reason to exist as an art form. As for Patchwork, it is a narrative fully populated with human beings, so many you are meant to lose track. Meet and enjoy them as they quickly vanish into the swirling background. There is a “plot,” and a fetish object to be gone in search of (a snuffbox), which lends itself to allegory if you badly want it to. There is the promise of love and adventure and misadventure, but these occur more as the conscious experience of the delirious effects of cacophonous language rather than via any character whose fictional status must be kept in denial. It is a didactic work insomuch as it hopes to reinforce a reverence for all manner of literary modes of language. Comitta senses that if the spell of their technique is to hold, and their moral be delivered, their book must not go on forever, though it could. Here the novella’s humanizing circumscription/compression dynamic comes to Comitta’s aid. (Patchwork is published through Coffee House’s NVLA series). Now, if you are to grant the premise of the jacket copy—that this is a story stitched together “seamlessly”—here is where you will need to apply your goodwill and suspend disbelief. Your level of readerly enjoyment will have an inverse relationship to your level of tight-assed exertion in attempting to hold onto every thread. If you are an enthusiastic reader of John Ashbery—how his writing washes over you, leaving in its tide all manner of glittering linguistic debris—you will have a great time reading Patchwork. If you are one of the few who have read and enjoyed Ted Berrigan’s “western novel” Clear the Range, you will recognize this place and be quite happy here.
Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions, July 2025)
“I work for the newswire, and I cover the economy, plus politics. I’m still getting the rhythm of it,” the narrator of Information Age informs the reader, and adjusting to this “newswire rhythm” is also the reader’s task. Lewis, a journalist when she is not writing fiction, tells her tale in staccato increments of images, dialogue, anecdote, and episode. Interpersonal and neutrally reported scenes, fragments that will amount to private epochs and world-historical events, are related interspersed, undifferentiated in tone or page time. The result is that familiar feeling of onslaught that we are accustomed to from scrolling timelines, but made pleasurable through Lewis’ skill, and because, though relentless and benumbing, we know a novella is taking shape. The narrator’s professional burden is to somehow make coherent news stories from an endless glut of amorphous material. The idea that there can exist a talent for this in certain individuals, “an ear,” begs the question of due vs undue responsibility with regards to those shaping reality for the rest of us. That the journalist might instead be a mere conduit, a mystical model of media, is also considered, if rather skeptically. But the true subject of the book, it seems to me, is the potential impossibility of forming a theory of individual rectitude in an apparently hostile era of technological acceleration, institutional decomposition and soon-expected environmental collapse. Too vast a problem to approach head on, it is wisely dramatized and brought down to scale through the narrator’s varied relationships, the people she knows and doesn’t, their respective predicaments, how they touch the narrator’s life and how they entangle. Add to this modern womanhood. Add the desire for children and their real possibility. Add personal ambition. Add the competing urges to lose and/or find oneself in someone else, in pleasure, to be still or travel, to leave things in the past or drag them with and subject them to imperfection, to act with the conception of a future in mind, to mourn in advance. What possibilities does language offer us? Are we, in so many ways, doomed (by our need for meaning-making)? Did I mention that the book is funny? Well it is at times, and melancholy. And its landscapes and people carefully rendered. You will enjoy this book if you have dissociated in the recent past, if time feels disjointed or has lately become a pleasant or unpleasant blur, if you think about sex, if “you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information” but you’re up for reading a novella.