A novella is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, typically ranging from 50 to 100 pages. Novellas are often collected into a single book or grouped with short stories. Well-known novellas include Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Novellas have seen a resurgence in popularity, with Steve Martin’s Shopgirl being adapted into a film.
A novella is the name given to a work longer than a short story, but too short to be listed as a novel. Typically, most novellas can range from 50 to 100 pages, although the length can vary. Some literary critics define the maximum length of a novella as 100,000 words. Today, the novella is rarely sold as a single work. More frequently, multiple novellas are collected into a single book, or a novella will be grouped with a series of short stories by the same author.
The first short story writer was probably Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote The Decameron in 1353. The book was a collection of one hundred short stories, narrated by characters trying to escape the Black Death in Italy. Many centuries later, in the 1800s, the short story became a popular literary form in Germany.
Many well-known works could be characterized as fitting the novella genre. Among them are Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea.
A more recent example of the novella form is Stephen King’s Different Seasons, which is a collection of four novellas. The works in this book were more literary and realistic than King’s horror fiction books. The novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” was later made into the critically acclaimed film, The Shawshank Redemption. Another novelization of the book, called “The Body,” was made into the coming-of-age film, Stand By Me, which has been a cult classic and popular favorite since its release in 1984.
While most publishing houses would not be interested in publishing novellas by new authors, there has been a resurgence in the form’s popularity, to some extent. Actor, comedian and writer Steve Martin has written a novel called “Shopgirl”; several years later, a film version was made, in which he played the main role.
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