Coming in from the cold - Mari Biella
The novella. It’s the wallflower of the literary world, continually snubbed and ignored, judged to be to nobody’s taste. Like an overlooked middle child, it has neither the star appeal of its big brother, the novel, nor the simple charm of the short story. Stephen King once described the novella as “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic”, and tellingly said that even he – Stephen King , who by his own admission could probably get his laundry list into print if he wanted to – had trouble convincing a publisher of his novellas’ worth. Big spines look good on shelves By many accounts , publishers are indeed reluctant to take on novellas. I’ve heard this attributed to a very simple, and brutally commercial, reason: novellas are simply too small to have much presence in bookshops. Readers are more likely to pluck a book off the shelf if it is physically prominent, with a thick, imposing spine. Novellas are also perceived to be less valuable: if a reader is going to spend his ...