Lots of great suggestions here. I would add Ice and Sleep Has His House by Anna Kavan. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns. Also all of Burroughs' novels tend to be on the short side. They're among my all-time favorites (especially the Nova Trilogy), but you have to love avant garde shit.

The Crying of Lot 49

Convenience Store Woman - An autistic woman works at a convenience store. Hijinks ensue. Cannery Row - very comfy book about some bums hanging out in Northern California

democritusjrjr1 year ago

I love all of Steinbeck's short works, but I think Tortilla Flat might be my favorite.

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iamafrog1 year ago

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. The Tarkovsky movie is ~4 hours long (I still haven't seen it), but the book is about 180 pages. Science fiction at its best. Conceptually brilliant and beautifully written. A very strange and special book.

(1) The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. it's the book with the most ghibli-vibes I have ever read. pastoral af (2) Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. for when you don't want to commit to 100yos (3) Franny by J.D. Salinger. I could take or leave Zooey. (4) Small Things Like These and also most stuff by Claire Keegan

random hodgepodge of books but off the top of my head: the ice palace - tarjei vesaas super beautiful novel about grief and moving on. has the most convincing child characters and pov ive ever read. the prose is poetic yet accessible and economic in its word choice. heavy with symbolism and metaphor. also great for the winter time amygdalatropolis - br yeager a horror novel about radical online atomization and isolation, one of the most depraved things ive ever read. one of the most thorough dissections of how the internet and online anonymity can bring the absolute worst out of people, diving really deep into the topic despite its brevity the last feast of harlequin - thomas ligotti a guy goes to a clown town and sees some fucked up shit. certified lovecraft approved. highly recommend black wings has my angel - elliot chaze im not well versed in noir but this novel really stood out to me. great prose and dynamic between the two main characters. basically the bag chaser bible

I'm not sure if it's my favourite but right now I'm reading "homesick for another world" and am super into it and want to talk about it.

dulla1 year ago

How short are we talking? 'The Cask of Amontillado' by Edgar Allen Poe I read in highschool, and boy that was a formative one...

literati1 year ago

Some lesser-known contemporary recs: Playing in the Light by Zoë Wicomb Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón Flee by Evan Dara

seconding convenience store woman and we have always lived in the castle, i found them both delightful. classics: - carmilla by sheridan le fanu - demian by hermann hesse - the stranger by albert camus - notes from underground by fyodor dostoevsky contemporary: - winter in sokcho by elisa shua dusapin - dogs of summer by andrea abreu - when we cease to understand the world by benjamín labatut

For some reason, I've decided to focus only on stuff that's come out in the past decade for this comment: I absolutely adored *Convenience Store Woman* by Sayaka Murata. Fantastic novel; it was first published in 2016 but its English translation was released in 2018. At 160-ish pages it is perhaps pushing onto the higher end of what might be considered "short", but definitely worth the read. *Minor Detail* by Adania Shibli (144 pages) is also really good. Published in 2017, with the English translation following in 2020. Lastly, relaxing my self-imposed "past decade" requirement a bit, almost everything Annie Ernaux has written is both fantastic and very short; most of her books clock in at less than 100 pages. I particularly enjoyed *A Man's Place*, perhaps simply because it was the first thing I read by her; although it was published nearer to the beginning of her career, she's come out with a lot more recent stuff, though, which I've unfortunately yet to get around to reading.

“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt. Barely even a novella—I think it’s around 60 pages—it tells the story of Marguerite, an heiress caught in scandal who’s trying to write a memoir amid the rapacity and midwittedness of the publishing industry. Marguerite’s voice is incredible, and I would read 1000 pages of her discussing bridge and piano and twilled silk and the most respectful way to treat your servants. Also “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto. A lovely short novel. A slice of life of a young Japanese woman who’s grieving her grandmother. Despite the subject matter, the book isn’t gloomy. I remember reading it years ago, saving it for the afternoon after my PSATs and drinking it down in a few hours on the patio of a cafe on a fine spring day, and those few hours still feel so sweet and bright, burnished as they were by the story. “Alien Hearts” by Guy deMaupassant. Here’s the description from NYRB: André Mariolle is a rich, handsome, gifted young man who cannot settle on what to do with himself. Madame de Burne, a glacially dazzling beauty, wants Mariolle to attend her exclusive salon for artists, composers, writers, and other intellectuals. At first Mariolle keeps his distance, but then he hits on the solution to all his problems: caring for nothing in particular, he will devote himself to being in love; Madame de Burne will be his everything. Soon lover and beloved are equally lost within a hall of mirrors of their common devising. I started reading this when I first started dating in college, and I remember taking it around with me on the bus, filling up the forty minutes or so before we would see each other, when nervousness, longing, tension, and confusion about what was happening, what he wanted, would all be shading through me. This was honestly the perfect book for that.

yesiamapersonplease1 year ago(edited)

On Beauty and Being Just, Darkness Visible, Abel's Island, The Employees

Definitely going to concur with a lot of the recommendations below (Zweig, Tanizaki, Dazai, and Shirley Jackson in particular), and add Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, which is an absolute wonder of literary economy -- no idea how he was able to pack this much into such a short space. Honorable mentions: Clarice Lispector -- Hour of the Star Par Lagerkvist -- Barabbas Paul Auster -- In the Country of Last Things Stanley Elkin -- The Living End Noah Cicero -- The Human War Tayeb Salih -- Season of Migration to the North

firesideangel1 year ago(edited)

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig is a good read, around 100 pages. It’s heavy with the sense of loss Zweig felt when he wrote the book in the middle of WWII when the Germans seemed to be winning. Pale Horse by Boris Savinkov is pretty good, around 120 pages. Savinkov was a left wing terrorist before the October revolution, and this book is a fictionalization of his work assassinating Russian governors and business magnates. The end drags a bit, but it’s a short book and a great look into the mind of a terrorist. Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy is amazing, and about 130 pages. It’s an amazing book, some of Tolstoy’s last fiction, and it shows. He’s sharp and cuts deep with every line, there’s no fluff for Tolstoy here. We follow the plight of a Caucus warlord as he comes up against the crushing force of history. As for the rest I’ll just list some that I like but are longer (still under 200 pages): Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest by Italo Calvino, Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

ela1 year ago

What a masterpiece chess story is I was kind of unsure at the start but by the end i was fully sucked into it

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Defining "short" as under 200 pages: In Praise of Shadows, Darkness Visible, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jesus' Son, Black Water, Sula, No Longer Human, Heart of Darkness, Horseman Pass By.

ela1 year ago

Thanks! I like in praise of shadows though it was very old fashioned sometimes

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iamafrog1 year ago

Darkness Visible is fantastic

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