Six Great Modern Short Novels

by James Joyce, Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol

The problems of human love and isolation and man's search for truth and dignity are portrayed in an anthology of short fiction

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literature, Anthologies, Classics

448 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just saw this on my Goodreads feed and recall reading it one winter in the mid seventies. If you have not read all of these authors and wonder about their style, or you have less time than you would need right now for longer works, these are shorter novels, most of them wonderful. And I don’t much care about the distinction, but the publisher calls these short novels and not just long short stories, though have it your way. Briefly, of the six, “The Dead” is one of the great shorter form stories in the history of literature, with a breath-taking conclusion. It’s the concluding story of Joyce’s Dubliners. That’s the greatest one here, in my view. If seen a play version and the terrific film adaptation by John Huston. Always start with Dubliners, in reading Joyce, the most accessible of his works but still genius on every page. Every sentence!

“He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Maybe the second truly great one is Faulkner’s “The Bear.” We know (of) his great novels like Absalom, Absalom and Light in August but he was also a master of the short form such as “A Rose for Emily.” The only reason the “The Bear” isn’t known quite as well is that it is just a bit too long to be taught in school as a short story. But it features some of his best writing, in my opinion.

"Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to become truth, as far as we know truth."

I also love Katherine Ann Porter’s (Ship of Fools) “Noon Wine” and Gogol’s (Fathers and Sons) “The Overcoat.” “Billy Budd” features themes and writing style echoing Moby Dick, and it’s not my favorite Melville, but a classic. I can’t recall and Wescott at all and may never have read it.

I think you can get free pdfs online of all of these short novels and I recommend you try one of them!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's rather unfair to read these short novels back to back. It's impossible, as the reader, not to compare them, pitting each great author against his or her peers, making value judgments on some of the strongest writers of the modern era. I couldn't help but find myself saying "Oh Gogol would have worded that better" or "Porter's Noon Wine ended better."

My only advice when reading this book is not to look at it as a compilation. Do not read it cover to cover. But rather, take each short novel on it's own. I enjoyed the bite-sized masterpieces from these authors, but wish I would have allowed more breathing room between the pieces.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Noon Wine was my favorite one, followed by the Overcoat.

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent collection of novellas, or short novels, or long short stories, or whatever one wants to call them, makes a great introduction to fiction of the "modernist" period. It contains two foundational works from the 1800s, Gogol's "The Overcoat" and Melville's "Billy Budd," plus four stories from the early 1900s.

James Joyce's "The Dead" will be probably the best known of the stories. It's a very typical piece of modernism, filled with symbolism and interior monologue. Not much happens. At a dinner party in Ireland around 1910 over the course of the conversation Gabriel Conroy comes to the realization that his marriage is not on the solid ground he thought it was, and that the people around him, and most importantly his wife, are motivated more by their romantic memories of the dead from their past than they are by the connections with the living people in their lives.

Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" is typical Melville, so not among my favorites. It's about the idea that innocence has no place in this world, with a sailing ship standing as a microcosm of society at large. Evil, ever resentful of innocence, will find a way to destroy the innocent. That is fine enough as it goes, but Melville's overwrought style, long-winded and full of many big words, drowns out the simplicity of the story.

Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine" is a remarkable story. I found that after finishing it, I just could not get it out of my head. I keep coming back to "what just happened?" Lazy dairy farmer Thompson and his ever-sickly wife get a stroke of unexpected luck when mysterious stranger Helton, a Swede from North Dakota, agrees to work for them for very little pay, converting the dairy into a working and prosperous business almost over night. Nine years later, and along comes the Devil to destroy Thompson's prosperity in the form of Hatch, a self-appointed bounty hunter of escaped convicts and "loonies", come to steal Helton from Thompson. What follows is a tragedy as immense emotionally as any tragedy of classical literature, even if the setting is just a small country dairy.

Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" may be my personal favorite of this collection. It is another story of a grand tragedy of a small life. Overworked and nearly destitute civil servant Akaky Akakyevitch invests all his money and the little pride that he has into a new overcoat that he believes will signify him as a man of importance. Theft of the overcoat sends him into a psychological freefall that extends beyond the grave.

Glenway Wescott's "The Pilgrim Hawk" is my least favorite of the stories. Written in 1940 and set in the 1920s, it's a somewhat modernized version of Henry James. A rather naive American abroad encounters corrupt Europeans. In this case, the narrator, called only Tower, is staying at a friend's villa with her in France when unannounced visitors arrive, the Anglo-Irish minor aristocrats Larry and Madeleine Cullen. Over the course of an afternoon, they reveal the wretched state of their marriage, symbolized in the falcon that Madeleine insists on keeping at all times, almost the sole source of her conversation. As in a Henry James story, not much happens, and it takes many, many, many words for not much to happen.

The final story is William Faulkner's "The Bear," one of his local folklore stories. Slowly, he draws in the reader with interesting and colorful characters in slightly beyond normal events surrounding the hunting of the Great Bear of the woods, almost a kind of animal spirit. It's a story of Man (yes, just man) vs. Nature, hero vs. hero (great bear vs. the great hunting dog Lion), and the subsequent death of the Old Times.

I recommend this collection if you have a local used book store around to find it.

[James Violand · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Fixation on the material can cause one to lose grip on reality ending in social mortification. Poignant, humorous and all-to-real depiction of the foibles of a bureaucrat cog in the great machine.

Billy Budd by Herman Melville
Strict adherence to discipline can lead to a gross injustice. Too bad Melville later lost his touch due to his irrational focus on hopelessness.

The Dead by James Joyce
I know my view of Joyce cuts against the grain of critical acclaim. This is a long-winded story that claims perspicacity but amounts to a simple truth: Our lives are momentary searches for meaning.

The Bear by William Faulkner
The decay of an Old Southern rural family in Northern Mississippi is juxtaposed against the annual hunt of a legendary bear in a stream of consciousness manner. The setting is so well developed you can smell the rain striking the forest floor.

Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter
After a lazy farmer hires a stranger, the latter improves the farm. Years later, another stranger arrives, tells the farmer the first stranger, now a part of the family, was an escaped lunatic murderer. The farmer thinks he sees the lunatic knifing the other stranger and kills him with an ax. He had been mistaken. Unforgiven by his community and his life in ruins, he kills himself. Another depressing story.

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott
This is a difficult short novel to get a handle on. A falcon newly owned by an eccentric wife much to the chagrin to her husband drops in on a young woman and her friend. The friend’s observations of the falcon is the story. As I read it, I wondered why it had ever been selected to grace the company of the other works in the volume.

[Mariah · Rating 4 out of 5]

GODDAMN, Faulkner, fuckin taking WEEKS to read because he's fucking around using words like:
Manumitted
Effluvium
Pulchritude

Like, man, if your writing a short story, a type of prose for the people, drop that archaic ass shit. Regardless, some really beautiful stuff. Really up in the progression of wonder inside of us all as we grow older, jaded.

Noon Wine rips. Stranger, hard worker, music, when hes gone the music's gone.

[Jimmacc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed all but one of the novels. And the one novel I didn’t enjoy completely enjoy (the Faulkner novel, I enjoyed the first third.

[Yossi Levanon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Regardless of the literary merits of each of these pieces don't buy this version it's fool of mistakes. I've never encountered anything like it before.

[シナモロール · Rating 2 out of 5]

A competently written, barely memorable collection.