modern classic short novels

The 20th century was a golden age for American publishing. This Shortish list of 50+ titles barely skims the surface. But you'll see several major authors took up the short-novel format. Check out the list.

You'll find several from the post-WWII area, and if you're unfamiliar with writing from that period and others, you're likely to encounter some outdated sensibilities and uncomfortable biases. So let's read them as artifacts of their own time and, because they're all short, as windows on how previous generations used to think and write.

In that spirit, the links here go to original texts (avoiding recently "updated" and expurgated editions). Here's just a few:

• Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's...
• I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. A comic tentpole for post-war Czech literature. Interesting to revisit with similar political currents today.
• The Oasis by Mary McCarthy. A short novel with big impact on generations of writers, the introduction by Vivian Gornick describes it as an "aphoritic, fearless dissection of the vanities of the human endeavor." It's also about a bunch of writers and intellectuals behaving badly over a weekend upstate.
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick. Cited by New York Review of Books as "one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years."

Look for more from Nabokov, Roth, Duras, Mishima, Burgess, Pynchon... as well as Gertrude Stein, Toni Morrison, Francois Saga and many others. Take a scroll through the Shortish list of classic 20th-century short novels.

The Shortish Project is an evolving database of new and classic short novels from publishers big and small. Find the latest. Discover hidden gems. Search by author, book title or ISBN here.

Or lean in and do a random scroll through the full Shortish database (600 titles or so)!