Kyle Minor rarely thinks small. When asked if he could maybe let my readers know if there was a novella he would suggest they read, he opted to send me a list...of 100. One thing you'll note is that Kyle is modest and does not include his own novella, "A Day Meant to Do Less," which only was included in Best American Mystery Stories the year it was published. From Kyle:

One hundred novellas you should read, right away (in no particular order):

1. "The Old Forest," by Peter Taylor.

2. "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," by Lee K. Abbott

3. "The Age of Grief," by Jane Smiley

4. "Goodbye, Madagascar," by Jennifer Spiegel

5. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

6. "Auslander," by Michelle Herman

7. Mitko, by Garth Greenwell

8. "All Through the House," by Christopher Coake

9. "The Palace Thief," by Ethan Canin

10. The Barracks Thief, by Tobias Wolff

11. "The Dew Breaker," by Edwidge Danticat

12. Street of Lost Footsteps, by Lyonel Trouillot

13. "The Beast God Forget to Invent," by Jim Harrison

14. Clown Girl, by Monica Drake

15. "The Womanizer," by Richard Ford

16. "The Bear," by William Faulkner

17. "The Talk Talked Between Worms," by Lee K. Abbott

18. "Gusev," by Anton Chekhov

19. "Fathers and Sons," by Ivan Turgenev

20. "The Death of Ivan Ilych," by Leo Tolstoy

21. "Heart of Darkness," by Joseph Conrad

22. Steps, by Jerzy Koszinski

23. From Old Notebooks, by Evan Lavender-Smith

24. Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

25. Indignation, by Philip Roth

26. Everyman, by Philip Roth

27. "Goodbye, Columbus," by Philip Roth

28. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

29. Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow

30. "Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin

31. "Makedonija," by Miroslav Penkov

32. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

33. "Poachers," by Tom Franklin

34. So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

35. Cataclysm Baby, by Matt Bell

36. "Puttermesser and Xanthippe," by Cynthia Ozick

37. Voices from the Moon, by Andre Dubus

38. The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata

39. Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

40. Seventeen, by Kenzaburo Oe

41. J, by Kenzaburo Oe

42. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras

43. Bloodbrothers, by Richard Price

44. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

45. "Good Old Neon," by David Foster Wallace

46. The Shawl & Rosa, by Cynthia Ozick

47. "In a Wilderness Station," by Alice Munro

48. "Meneseteung," by Alice Munro

49. "The Love of a Good Woman," by Alice Munro

50. "Brokeback Mountain," by Annie Proulx

51. "A Bear Came Over the Mountain," by Alice Munro

52. "The Collectors," by Matt Bell

53. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker

54. By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolano

55. "Legends of the Fall," by Jim Harrison

56. "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," by Stephen King

57. "The Body," by Stephen King

58. "Low Men in Yellow Coats," by Stephen King

59. "Hearts in Atlantis," by Stephen King

60. The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing

61. Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to entricate., by Johannes Goransson

62. Ask the Dust, by John Fante

63. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," by F. Scott Fitzgerald

64. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

65. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

66. The Cement Garden, by Ian McEwan

67. Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

68. Carrie, by Stephen King

69. Kaddish for the Unborn Child, by Imre Kertesz

70. "We Don't Live Here Anymore," by Andre Dubus

71. "Adultery," by Andre Dubus

72. "Finding a Girl in America," by Andre Dubus

73. "The Pretty Girl," by Andre Dubus

74. Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo

75. "Pafko at the Wall," by Don DeLillo

76. Oh What a Paradise It Seems!, by John Cheever

77. A Heaven of Others, by Joshua Cohen

78. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

79. Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain

80. I Lock My Door Upon Myself, by Joyce Carol Oates

81. The Long March, by William Styron

82. "June Recital," by Eudora Welty

83. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," by Katherine Anne Porter

84. "A Long Day in November," by Ernest Gaines

85. "The Making of Ashenden," by Stanley Elkin

86. "Death in Venice," by Thomas Mann

87. "The Dead," by James Joyce

88. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

89. "Spotted Horses," by William Faulkner

90. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers

91. "A River Runs Through It," by Norman MacLean

92. Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote

93.The Double, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

94. The Gambler, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

95. Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox

96. The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor

97. "Reading Turgenev," by William Trevor

98. "My House in Umbria," by William Trevor

99. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

100. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



