In Praise of the Short Novel

In case you hadn't noticed, the novel seems to be getting longer and longer, some clocking in at 700-800+ pages.

In a gag news article we wrote a while back, we riffed on the idea of authors taking performance enhancing drugs, enabling them to pound out longer and longer sentences, leading to "stupefyingly longer" books.

Now someone's pushing back. Although publishers have pressed him "to write longer books," Welsh author Cynan Jones praises the short novel.

He points to The Old Man and the Sea, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Animal Farm, even Gatsby (though Fitzgerald worried it was too short). Here's Cynan Jones on the subject:

I've never met a reader who doesn't like short novels.... For me, the opportunity to sit somewhere for two hours and read a book from start to finish—to submerge myself in it—is a thrilling experience. A short novel makes a straightforward demand: give me this time.

Readers don't buy books by the the pound, Jones points out. And publishers should get over their obsession with longer works. "The only thing to be taken into account should be the impact a piece of writing has," says Jones. Yep, we couldn't agree more.

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Cynan Jones is the author of The Dig and, more recently, Everything I Found on the Beach. The full article can be read in Publisher's Weekly.