Ten Great Novellas

There's something wonderfully sneaky about the novella. It's not quite a short story, not quite a novel. It's the literary equivalent of a perfect afternoon: long enough to get lost in, short enough to finish before dinner. Clocking in anywhere from 60 to 160 pages, the novella is the ideal training ground for a young writer and the ideal companion for a reader who wants a complete emotional journey without a two-week commitment. It's a form that rewards precision, and the ten books below prove just how much power a writer can pack into so few pages.

Seven of these came to me the way they come to most of us: as required reading in high school, dog-eared and highlighted under fluorescent classroom lights. Animal Farm by George Orwell taught a generation of teenagers that pigs make surprisingly effective political satirists. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka turned a man into a bug and, somehow, made it feel like the most relatable Monday morning ever written. The Stranger by Albert Camus introduced us to existentialism before we even knew what to call it, while Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck broke hearts on schedule every spring semester.

Then there's Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, dense and haunting, sending readers up the river long before Coppola sent Martin Sheen. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway showed that a story about one man, one fish, and one very long fight could still feel like an epic. And The Third Man by Graham Greene rounded out the classroom curriculum with shadows, zithers, and moral ambiguity in postwar Vienna.

But graduation didn't end the reading list. It just paused it. The remaining three have been waiting for me ever since, and I'm delighted to finally be catching up. Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption proved that the master of horror could write hope just as convincingly as he writes dread. Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is a quiet, aching marvel, the story of one ordinary life told with the patience of a river carving canyon walls. And Patrick Rothfuss's The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a strange, tender little book that breaks nearly every rule of storytelling and somehow becomes more magical for it.

What strikes me, moving between the assigned classics and these later discoveries, is how little the form has changed even as the stories have. Whether it's a talking pig, a giant marlin, or a girl who lives in the walls of an underground school, the novella still does what it's always done best: it gets in, breaks your heart or blows your mind, and gets out before you've had time to catch your breath. Ten books, ten very different worlds, and not a wasted page among them.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)

The Metamorphosis by Frans Kafka (1915)

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

The Third Man by Graham Greene (1950)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)

Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson (2011)

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss (2014)

Classic Literature by Black Authors (part 2)

"Quicksand" by Nella Larsen

"The Wedding" by Dorothy West

"Black No More" by George Schuyler

"Not Without Laughter" by Langston Hughes

"Sula" by Toni Morrison

"Romance in Marseille" by Claude McKay

"The Blacker the Berry" by Wallace Thurman

Studying Text - "Learning is the process of turning information into knowledge"

“Learning is the process of turning information into knowledge.  That is, establishing information in your memory that can be recalled and used.  The two main strategies are repetition and elaboration.”[1]  “While the Common Core State Standards share many features and concepts with existing standards, the new standards also represent a substantial departure from current practice in a number of respects.”[2]

The Common Core Standards set consistent and clear expectations for what students must know at the completion of each grade from Kindergarten through high school.  The standards establish expectations in three academic areas: mathematics, English language arts, and Literacy.  “The literacy standards establish reading and writing expectations for students in social studies, science, and technology. These standards provide few specifics on what students need to read or write, focusing instead on how students should read and write in these courses and how to evaluate what qualifies as good writing.”[3]  There are a number of fundamental literacy components in the Common Core Standards that educators, students, and parents should focus on adopting.  They include: improving reading comprehension, honing writing skills, and cultivating speaking and listening skills.  “Instructional materials will need to challenge students to read and understand more complex texts, build vocabulary, and extract details from texts to use as supporting material in essays and other written work.”[4]

“What I find troubling is the lack of concern of what a colleague of mine calls unwarranted self-regard.[5]

Marlene Zuk is a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota and has published several treatises on evolution and science.  A reviewer of her book “Paleofantasy – What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live” wrote, “As Zuk compellingly argues, such beliefs incorrectly assume that we’re stuck—finished evolving—and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults’ ability to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we’ve actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were “meant to” fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is full of trade-offs.[6]  Zuk’s article regarding student self-esteem is along similar lines of thought.  That students de-couple their own level of intelligence and reasoning from test scores or exam results.  Zuk states, “Maybe it’s all that self-esteem this generation of students was inculcated with as youngsters, or maybe it’s the emphasis on respecting everyone else’s opinion, to the point where no answer, even a mathematical one, can be truly wrong because that might offend the one who gave it.”[7]  While her opinion is forceful and direct, it is opinion and not fact.  Students may or may not on the whole have high sense of self-esteem.  Equally students have a low sense of self-esteem and are in a critical phase of self-identity and self-confidence which compounds their ability to learn or properly engage in the classroom.  Issues of high self-esteem are not nearly as important as educational resources and supportive instructional curriculum.

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[1] Londe. The Biology of Learning. 1

[2] Rothman. Nine Ways the Common Core Will Change Classroom Practice.

[3] California Common Core State Standards, http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstandards.pdf

[4] Idib.

[5] Zuk. Right, Wrong..What’s the Dif?

[6] http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=24733

[7] Idib.

Writing Across the Curriculum

“… Reading and writing are two side of the same coin. whereas the writer works to make a text sensible, the reader works to make a text sensible, the reader works to make sense from a text. As a result, the two processes, rooted in language, are intertwined and share common cognitive and sociocultureal characteristics. Both reading and writing, for example, involve purpose, commitment, schema activation, planning, working with ideas, revision and rethinking, and monitoring.”[1]

“The relationships between reading and writing have been a source of inquiry by language researchers since the mid-1970s.”[2]  My parents where strong advocates of reading, specially early reading because they believed that good readers make good writers.  As Richard T. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca, authors of Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum point out, “students who are good readers and writers perceive themselves as such and are more likely to engage in reading and writing on their own.”[3]  There is no mystery to that observation.  The challenge is how do you encourage a student who is a weak reader and a weak writer to become stronger in either area?  Both ends of the spectrum are self-reinforcing scaffolds.  As a student increasing become frustrated with their writing, they are equally frustrated by difficult or challenging reading material.  How does a teacher break the cycle?  On suggestion is short and informal writing tasks: Writing to Learn (WTL).  Using ‘quick-writes’ which focus on capturing an student’s ideas, or concepts very quickly and spontaneously – they spend less time frustrated with composition and more time focus on expression and understanding.  “WLT should not be confused with learning to write”[4]- rather student concentrate on “summarizing and extending their thoughts about a subject.”[5]

Vacca explains another writing technique that is creative, nonthreatening, and fun - POVG (point of view guide) are designed to "trigger thoughtful reading and writing by having students 'get inside the skin' of a character or a subject under study.”[6]  This exercise is simple and short, to have the student think outside of themselves in a creative fashion.  Students involved in a POVG can, ask questions in an interview format; or role-play; or use first-person inquiry to help overcome the fear or frustration of writing.  Once a student is comfortable writing, nearly anything, then as an instructor, we can introduce additional structure to their writing.  “Using a variety of instructional activities, including microthemes, POVGs, unsent letters, biopoems, dialogues, and admit/exit slips”[7] – all do the same, they allow the student to write without fear of failure.

Vacca uses Anne Frank, the world’s most famous child diarist, as an example of the merits of keeping a personal journal.  Does he anticipate our student’s experiences to equal hiding against Nazis and the death camps as the motivation to write?  I think journaling is an excellent activity to encourage a student to write without fear of evaluation or judgment.  Great writing can be developed if the student is allow to “freely express their feelings and thoughts in response to what they are reading and learning.”[8]

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[1]      Richard T. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca. Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum,  Close, Hull, & Langer 2005. p.282.

[2]      Ibid., p.283.

[3]      Ibid., p.283.

[4]      Ibid, p.285

[5]      Ibid., p.285.

[6]      Ibid., p.286.

[7]      Ibid., p.285.

[8]      Ibid., p.294.