Word: novella
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Vladimir Nabokov called it "posh-lost," a Russian term he translates as "crude pseudo literature." Thomas Mann called it Death in Venice, perhaps the most celebrated novella of the 20th century...
...Broken Clown. In his film adaptation, Luchino Visconti (The Damned) pays his utmost disrespect to the original by maintaining Mann's fustian and removing his intention. In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave...
...this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946. It started with his notes on a trip to the islands off British Columbia. These became a short story. Then the story grew first into a novella and finally into an amorphous novel full of Lowry's preoccupations with alcohol, mythologems, cabalistic gewgaws and theosophist arcana. In 1957, two months before he died after a bout of heavy drinking, Lowry was still struggling to tame the surge of words and images...
Based on Ivan Turgenev's novella, First Love is the deceptively elemental narrative of an adolescent smitten by his father's mistress. "It is a story unusually lit with affection and nature," says Schell. "I decided only one photographer could really do it-Sven Nykvist, the artist who does Bergman's films. When he agreed I knew the picture would happen, and that it would work." Schell's instinct has proved infallible. Nykvist has filled the film with indelible imagery. The sunlight is a featured player of humor and warmth. Interiors seem to exhale melancholy. Weightless...
...Wallop's relief does not last long. Her own son Osgood, a struggling writer in New York, publishes a novella entitled The Duchess of Obloquy. Sandwiched in its entirety between Emma's own narrative, it moans the familiar tale of the castrated son. Through its absurd parodic details, however, De Vries engineers a nimble satire of contemporary attitudes on sex, race and Women...