Short and Stunning

Length has nothing to do with weight. These six novellas (the longest barely 150 pages) do in an afternoon what other books need eight hundred to attempt, and don't waste a sentence doing it.

1. 1
   The Overcoat

   Nikolai Gogol · 1842

   Lvl 348pp

   Forty-eight pages said to have spawned all of Russian literature: a clerk, a coat, and a haunting that outlasts him.

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2. 2
   The Metamorphosis

   Franz Kafka · 1915

   Lvl 496pp

   A man wakes up as an insect and the prose doesn't blink: comedy and horror running on the exact same track.

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3. 3
   So Long a Letter

   Mariama Bâ · 1979

   Lvl 396pp

   A widow's letter to her oldest friend becomes a quiet indictment of polygamy and a society's bargain with women.

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4. 4
   Pedro Páramo

   Juan Rulfo · 1955

   Lvl 7124pp

   A son goes looking for his father in a town that turns out to be full of the dead: ninety minutes, unforgettable.

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5. 5
   The Stranger

   Albert Camus · 1942

   Lvl 3128pp

   A man kills someone because the sun was in his eyes, and means it: existentialism's coldest, cleanest argument.

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6. 6
   Heart of Darkness

   Joseph Conrad · 1899

   Lvl 7144pp

   The longest of the six and still barely a novella: a riverboat into empire's id, dark enough to haunt a century of fiction after it.

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