200 or Less Pages of Classics to Enjoy

[Lesle, Appalachian Bibliophile]

Here is a list of classic novels under 200 pages, with approximate page counts:

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (approx. 107 pages, 1937) - A powerful story of friendship and tragedy set during the Great Depression in California.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (approx. 112 pages, 1945) - A satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution using farm animals.

The Stranger by Albert Camus (approx. 123 pages, 1942) - A seminal work of existentialist literature exploring the absurdity of life.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (approx. 127 pages, 1952) - A Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an aging Cuban fisherman and his battle with a giant marlin.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (approx. 76 pages, 1915) - The bizarre tale of a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (approx. 180 pages, 1925) - A quintessential American novel about wealth, love, and the post-war American Dream.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (approx. 146 pages, 1962) - A chilling gothic novel about two sisters living in isolation after a family tragedy.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (approx. 96 pages, 1899) - A novella that delves into the dark realities of colonialism in Africa.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (approx. 159 pages, 1956) - A poignant story of an American man in Paris and his complex relationship with a young Italian bartender.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (approx. 158 pages, 1953) - A dystopian novel about a future society where books are outlawed and burned.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (approx. 192 pages, 1962) - A controversial dystopian novel exploring free will and the capacity for violence.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (approx. 194 pages, 1937) - A powerful story following a Black woman's journey of self-discovery and independence in early 20th-century Florida.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940) : 103 pages, about a fugitive whose stay on a mysterious island is disturbed by a gang of tourists, but actually it’s about the nature of reality and our relationship to it, told in the most hypnotizing, surrealist style.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) : 112 pages, A people-pleaser, in more ways than one: Sherlock Holmes, after all, had been dead for years when his creator finally bent to public demand (and more importantly, the demand of his wallet) and brought him back, in this satisfying and much-beloved tale of curses and hellbeasts and, of course, deductions.

Passing by Nella Larsen (1929) : 122 pages, One of the landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, about not only race but also gender and class—not to mention self-invention, perception, capitalism, motherhood and friendship.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955) : 128 pages, The strange, fragmented ghost story that famously paved the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude (according to Gabriel García Márquez himself), but is an enigmatic masterpiece in its own right.

The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino (1959) : 128 pages, The companion volume to The Nonexistent Knight and The Baron in the Trees concerns a Viscount who is clocked by a cannonball and split into two halves: his good side and his bad side. They end up in a duel over their wife.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899) : 128 pages, an example of early feminist literature, more than 120 years later, and it’s still taboo for a woman to put herself and her own desires above her children. Whom among us has not wanted to smash a symbolic glass vase into the hearth?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886) : 128 pages, Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life.

In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (1968) : 138 pages, a wacky post-apocalyptic novel concerns a bunch of people living in a commune called iDEATH. The titular watermelon sugar seems to be the raw material for everything from homes to clothes. It’s all nonsense, of course, but...

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson (1912) : 140 pages, an “autobiography” written by a Black man living as white, but uneasily, considering himself a failure, feeling until the end the grief of giving up his heritage and all the pain and joy that came with it.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912) : 142 pages, a story as doomed as Venice itself, but also a queer and philosophical mini-masterpiece. It is serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) : 152 pages, masterpiece takes place over a single day in the life of a middle-aged English expat professor living uneasily in California after the unexpected death of his partner. An utterly absorbing and deeply pleasurable novel.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864) : 154 pages, written from the first-person perspective of the “underground man,” who ridicules his contemporaries for their utopian visions that human evil could be cured by the adherence to rationality.

Ice by Anna Kavan (1967) : 158 pages, a terrifying novel obsessively pursues a young woman through an icy apocalypse. A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction.

Cane by Jean Toomer (1923) : 158 pages, a Harlem Renaissance author about a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard (1962) : 158 pages, a British science fiction novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered uninhabitable much of the surface of planet Earth.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) : 158 pages, an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” An modernist psychological horror novel that is notoriously difficult.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956) : 159 pages, one of the most convincing love stories of any kind ever written, the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (1913) : 159 pages, A mythic, proto-feminist frontier novel about a young Swedish immigrant making a home for herself in Nebraska.

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1955) : 160 pages, a scandalous novel of youthful hedonism, that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936) : 170 pages, T.S. Eliot praised “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1937) : 175 pages, a story of doomed love spun out in a series of indelible, frozen images—both beautiful and essentially suspicious of beauty.

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark (1963) : 176 pages, The girls live in the May of Teck Club, disturbed but not destroyed by WWII—both the Club and the girls with their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world. They are fearless and frightened at the same time.

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser (1969) : 176 pages, a young man of noble background who runs away from home and decides to spend the rest of his life serving others. To this end, he enrolls at the Benjamenta Institute, a school for servants.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958) : 179 pages, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner (1969) : 183 pages, the best boxing novel that explores themes of dashed hopes, struggle, and the quiet desperation of working-class life.

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968) : 185 pages, a Native American Renaissance. Intricate, romantic, and lush, it is at its core about the creaking dissonance of two incompatible worlds existing in the same place (both literally and metaphysically) at the same time.

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes (1945) : 186 pages, an African-American shipyard worker as a crew leader in Los Angeles during World War II. Four days in the life of Robert "Bob" Jones.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) : 190 pages, a kind but bumbling Russian émigré professor at an American college in the 1950s, who navigates cultural clashes, academic absurdities, and personal heartache with humor and poignancy, as he struggles with English.

Norwood by Charles Portis (1966) : 190 pages, author of True Grit, but this is his first novel. A comic masterpiece about a young man traipsing across a surreal America to lay his hands on $70.

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (1943) : 192 pages, recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. Joana is playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (1954) : 193 pages, “a kind of hybrid of the pastoral and the naturalistic, an idyllic text about what it’s like to grow up next to a river, a text that also just happens to contain some pretty shocking and sad disasters.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967) : 198 pages, set in Victoria, Australia in 1900, it is about a group of female boarding school students who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community.

[Piyangie, Classical Princess]

I have only read 16 from the list.