Reading list
The best classic novellas
The novella is the form many great writers did their best work in: long enough for a whole life, short enough to keep every page tight. Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Conrad, Melville and James all wrote one that many readers rank above their long novels.
20 books, all free to read
Some of these come inside a collection of the author's shorter fiction; the note says which story to open, and the app opens the book at its start.
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1. Short Fiction The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
A judge who did everything right discovers, while dying, that he never lived. Perhaps the greatest novella ever written.
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2. Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the river to find Kurtz. Conrad's most famous and most argued-over book.
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3. Short Fiction Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
A famous writer goes to Venice for a rest and falls apart. Mann's most perfect work.
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4. Short Fiction Billy Budd and Bartleby
by Herman Melville
Melville's shorter fiction: the innocent sailor hanged for a blow, and the clerk who would prefer not to.
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6. Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton
A New England farmer, his sick wife and her young cousin. Wharton's bleakest and best.
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7. Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The underground man's monologue and his miserable evening. The novella that started existentialism.
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8. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's nightmare, written in a few days and rewritten in a few more.
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9. The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
Buck's journey from California estate to the wild. London's finest work.
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10. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A short novel rather than a novella, but it has a novella's perfect economy.
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12. Short Fiction Ward No. 6 and The Lady with the Dog
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's longer stories, among them a doctor who ends up in his own asylum.
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13. Short Fiction The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
The clerk and his coat, the most influential story in Russian.
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14. Short Fiction Passing
by Nella Larsen
Two childhood friends, one of whom is passing as white, meet again. Nella Larsen's taut, tragic masterpiece.
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15. A Lost Lady
by Willa Cather
A small Nebraska town watches a charming woman decline. Cather's finest short novel.
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16. My Mortal Enemy
by Willa Cather
A runaway marriage, seen twice, twenty years apart. Cather at her most compressed.
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17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
Five people die when a bridge falls. Was it chance? A Pulitzer winner in a hundred pages.
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18. The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's summer of awakening. Chopin's scandal, now a classic.
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19. The Duel
by Anton Chekhov
Two men on the Black Sea coast quarrel until it ends in a duel. Chekhov's best long story.
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20. The Country of the Pointed Firs
by Sarah Orne Jewett
A summer in a Maine fishing village. Willa Cather put it beside The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.