Twenty Favorite Very Short Novels
(I know that page counts are a misleading metric, but they’re much easier to determine than word counts. These, therefore, are my twenty favorite novels of fewer than 100 pages, arranged in ascending order by page count. You’ll find my corresponding list of very long novels here.)
52 pages: Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
63 pages: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin
70 pages: Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos
77 pages; The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
80 pages: The Lady in White by Christian Bobin
83 pages: This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
83 pages: Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
84 pages: 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat
84 pages: Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
85 pages: Springtime: A Ghost Story by Michelle de Kretser
85 pages: Fireflies by Luis Sagasti
86 pages: The Sextine Chapel by Hervé Le Tellier
87 pages: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira (who has many other books that would qualify, some even shorter)
91 pages: Silk by Alessandro Baricco
93 pages: A Man: Klaus Klump by Gonçalo Tavares
94 pages: Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba
94 pages: Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
96 pages: The Colors of Infamy by Albert Cossery
97 pages: The Scream by Laurent Graff
98 pages: Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
— November 22, 2020