Light Reading: Small Books in the American Literary Landscape

César Aira | The Famous Magician | New Directions | 2022 | 43 Pages

Mark Haber | Saint Sebastian’s Abyss | Coffee House Press | 2022 | 141 Pages

This September, New Directions will come out with their first six titles under the new series Storybook ND. In look and feel, these reprints seem like an updated version of the classic Little Golden Books, complete with an edging band on the spine and a thick cardboard cover. The authors included in the first tranche of books in the series should be familiar to New Directions devotees, with Clarice Lispector and César Aira headlining alongside Helen Dewitt, Yoko Tawada, Osamu Dazai, and the reclusive Czech writer and International Booker Prize winner László Krasznahorkai. The series features slim hardcover books designed, New Directions says, “to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” The publisher paints a picture of reading that’s nostalgic, tactile, and imbued with a sense of accomplishment—the “afternoon” here might be a particular nod to precocious latchkey kids who spent their childhoods after school reading yellowed library books cover to cover. 

The pleasure of reading, the series implies, has been lost on adult readers, whose Sisyphean tasks and adult sensibilities about what constitutes a real book push them toward ever-longer novels (just think of My Struggle: Book Two or Ducks, Newburyport). As a high school teacher, I’ll see students turn away from reading as it evolves from a hobby into homework. But New Directions asks us to go back to the comfort that is childhood reading, before it was ruined by us high school teachers—back when we could both get lost in a marvelous book and finish it in an afternoon. This understanding of the goals of Storybook ND brings with it a dual sense of time: time spent reading and time as experienced inside the text.

It’s an intriguing prospect for a project to take aim explicitly at the reader’s experience of time and accomplishment as integral to the pleasure of reading. Ask any book designer, and it’s clear that the feel of the book in your hand and its aesthetics are always top of mind. Deckled-edge pages and flapped softcovers abound on American bookstore shelves—the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition uses both for Fagel’s translation of The Odyssey. But New Directions, in creating this series, asserts something that often fails to gain traction in the American literary public: even for adults, there can and should be pleasure not just in reading, but in short books. 

The small novel is largely lost on American audiences. Go to your local bookstore, and under New Fiction you’ll find book after book 200 to 500 pages in length. And it’s not just book stores. Not since 2008 has the National Book Award for Fiction been given outside this range (and that book, Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country was over the normal length at 912 pages). You’d have to go back to 1935, one of the earliest years of the award, to find a book less than 200 pages: Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Doctor Lao, a strange fantastical story of a Depression-era plains town visited by a circus of mythological creatures (it reminds me of an Americanized César Aira story). In its official requirements, the National Book Award limits itself to “full-length books.” But what is the page limit for this fuzzily defined term? And who gets to set its definition?

It should be only fitting that César Aira, whose forty-three-page The Famous Magician is part of the Storybook ND series, would have something to say about novels and small books. Almost uniformly, Aira’s nineteen books so far translated have been little pocket-sized things. According to Aira, the novel only “requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel.” For him, a novel is classified not by page, or word count, or even size. He says nothing of editing, or returning, or reworking. Just that time passes in the novel. For him, it seems, a book’s category is less about page count, and more about narrative scope.

I encountered his definition when I bought Aira’s memoir Birthday in 2019. By accident the publisher sent a four-pack, a mistake neatly wrapped in cello-plastic. The irony of the multiplicity wasn’t lost on me. The book is so slight, just 80 pages, that whoever mailed it up must have grabbed the pack of books and shipped them out as one. 

It’s a very excusable mistake, especially because it gave me books to share. Also because Aira’s books are often not just short, but small. Even his monumental story collection, The Musical Brain, could easily slip into a jacket pocket at 351 pages.

Aira’s books—famously—are never edited, at least according to him. Stories, he says in Birthday, should only move forward. He signs each book with the date and time, as if they were the product of one impossibly prodigious day of writing. It’s how you can tell Emma, The Captive (“21 October, 1978”) was written before The Hare (“Pringles, 6 September, 1996”) despite being published by New Directions in 2016, and 2013, respectively.

The Famous Magician, Aira’s newest title, both fits and doesn’t fit his usual mold. At only forty-three pages, it’s the shortest book of Aira’s that New Directions has put out, but its cover size, uniform with the whole series, gives it the feel of something much longer. 

The story itself fits Aira’s definition of a novel. In it, a writer, César Aira, meets an itinerant magician, Ovando, and is offered an opportunity: Aira can be the magician’s apprentice and learn to manipulate the physical world around him, but if he does, he can no longer read or write literature. As proof that he means business, Ovando produces a sugar cube, which he promptly turns into gold. 

Aira has a week to decide. 

It’s not a setup that will be unfamiliar to Aira’s readers—or at least, its style will seem familiar. It’s a novel about literature, but also about how the experiences of the world and literature interact. Is that interaction all the “magic” that Aira (as in, the character) will need? Aira, in his deliberations, explains that there’s a certain tension between reality, magic, and literature—each vying for a sort of preeminence over one another. Each holding sway over the other. But it’s never that simple. They not only compete, but endlessly overlap in the writer’s mind as he tackles his Faustian “deal” with Ovando. “And yet what was Literature,” Aira wonders, “what had it been for me if not the protean power of transformation, which I now [through magic] had the means to transpose to the plane of reality?”

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The sense that bigger books are more important seems baked into American reading. You can see it in the unwillingness of big publishers to buy anything but substantial novels (see: 80k+ words), but also in the way American books fit in our hands, and make us feel as we read them.

It’s tough to get hard data how many short novels or novellas are published by the Big 5 each year, but a rough search turns up an endless string of agent-interviews and reader statements warning against novellas. 

The small novel still finds a market in the U.S. as titles in translation, imported by independent publishers from overseas where the small novel still has a domestic market. But wouldn’t it stand, then, that if all these small novels are coming to the American market in translation, there would be a market for American novels of the same size?

A few years ago, the writer Tobias Carrol asked this question in an essay in Electric Literature titled “Why Doesn’t America Love the Novella?” The answer he came up with was split between the economic (big books make more money), and the cultural (Americans feel there’s something of substance to the “doorstop” novels). Both of these explanations might be best understood through the very American term “novella,” and its purchase in relation to the international markets. 

Like a lot of definitions, the term novella starts by indicating what a book is not. It screams, loudly, this is not “A Novel.” It’s shorter. It’s less serious. In some ways, the diminutive places it outside of the world of “a book” and into something else. In order for a book to be taken seriously, it cannot be a novella. And serious books comply with this rule. You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy of Ethan Frome, Of Mice and Men, or Heart of Darkness that include “novella” on its cover. When George Orwell’s Animal Farm had its first American printing, it dropped its reading line of “A Fairy Story.” It couldn’t claim to be a novel, but better be nothing than something less than a novel. And even for contemporary books, the term seems toxic. Teju Cole’s Everyday is for the Thief was the first book that I saw with the reading line “Fiction.” Not “Stories” or “A Novel.” Was it a short novel? Surely there was already a name for that. 

In American publishing, this mania for categorization dominates, best understood in the proliferation of the reading line “A Novel” on book covers. Eliza Brooks writing for Vox points out that the common reading line of “A Novel” on American books might be something of a sleepwalking tradition: nobody knows why it is still done, but it’s done nonetheless. Did it start in reaction to modern “novels” bending genres? Did it start as a way to indicate the substance or size of a text? Did it start as a way to delineate fiction and nonfiction texts? Brooks concludes that “people may not have much to say about it, but it does say a lot.” No matter its origins, the reading line lends a sense of authority to a text, and puts it on sure ground as a book of substance, and a book of length, as well. But why does it do this for American audiences? What ingrained desire does it exploit?

Partial explanation might come from the American obsession with length in books. Here is where I can lay blame, and that’s because the blame can be put squarely on the shoulders of my own profession of secondary teaching. 

When I write up a curriculum, I start with the primary texts, and then use those texts to teach both the body of knowledge around them, but also develop a set of critical skills through our shared inquiry of those texts. But there’s a different tack, which asserts that curriculums should be structured around marketable skill-sets and the ability to problem-solve, focusing a student’s ability to extract key information from short texts. To do this, teachers can’t spend a whole term on Pride and Prejudice. Courses instead set their goalposts at the limited scope of state-standardized test curricula. Students’ focus is structured around finding main ideas, purpose, and topic sentences, so-called universal themes, and narrative structures. In other words, valuable skills. But they need to do so in the familiar environment of the extract—the couple pages or paragraphs that fit into state testing materials. No test can ask that you read a novel to test your skills, so why teach a novel to develop those skills? The two ways of looking at literature and literacy don’t have to be at odds. But the contemporary debate continues among the people, secondary teachers, who introduce novels, and literature, to most of America. 

After a recent graduation at the UK campus of the Bread Loaf school, I talked with a friend who was from and taught in Mississippi, and had just accepted a position as a DPhil at Oxford researching the divide between teaching literature and teaching literacy skills. “The kids don’t read,” he told me, his accent humorously lilted like a gossipy churchgoer. Appropriately, we sat in the gardens of London’s Foundling Museum, just east of Russel Square and worried about the kids (as high school teachers tend to do in the summer). In fact, he said, the schools where he’d taught didn’t even have novels on the curriculum for most students. Not long novels, nor short novels. “Extracts,” he moaned. It seemed like something of an apocalypse. I had been rereading Aira’s The Literary Conference on my way to meet this friend. And as its slight form sat in my lap, I wondered what that little book communicated with its size.

It’s an ongoing discussion among high school teachers about what role long, sustained reading has on literacy and the development of our students. Like the short novel conundrum, teachers are constantly prodded and pulled by market forces. Are we teaching marketable skills? Are we preparing our students for a future? But also: Are we teaching them literature that’s significant, and big enough to be of value.

But the current debate sits at odds with how the current crop of readers learned. For years, teachers stressed length. Everyone stressed length. And reading level, and appropriateness. There’s a sense of pride in reading a longer book, especially since so many of today’s adult readers were once child and student readers. There’s a lot of incentive for reading more, and reading longer, and for feeling more adult and accomplished for reading those longer books. Once you’re in middle school, you’re not going to win your Pizza Hut personal pan pizza Book It! reward reading picture books (the program, which offers Pizza Hut rewards for reading, is the biggest corporate-sponsored reading campaign in the country). You’re not going to have your name in the school library as a star reader. The relevant authorities just won’t allow it. And the personal pan pizza winners of the world, those are the people who end up buying books from bookstores later in life. For them, the feeling of accomplishment comes not just from finishing a book, but from finishing a book that seems like an accomplishment, a measure easily sussed out with that reading line: A Novel.

The problem with Pizza Hut Book It! all-stars becoming English teachers is that their needy sense of accomplishment isn’t the only way to see a book. Which brings us to our second, maybe more insightful issue when it comes to small books. Often, my students have the opposite tack: judging in their way whether a given text is a “thick boi” or not, with a skeptical eye on their own packed schedules of sports and after school jobs and SAT tutors. Maybe it’s easy to call this laziness, or the product of a youth spent on TikTok and Snapchat instead of contemplating the laborious big books of the world. The kids, as my friend said, don’t read. But maybe this is where the small novel comes into play. It doesn’t seem that the New Directions editors feel that small books spring from the desires of a short attention span. It’s here where the idea of the pleasure of quick completion, instead of pleasure in the volume of completion, comes into focus: There is ample room for a book that is both big enough to be of substance, but short enough to just take an afternoon. 

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Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (its reading line indicates we should consider it “A Novel”) plays interesting games with digression and time. Though the novel could be said to take place in a day when two former best friends, the narrator and Schmidt, are set to reunite after the narrator has said an unforgivable thing. But it also branches off from that moment in the type of baroque spirals of story and time that align it with a tradition of obsessive narrators. In this narrative style, along with its length (140 pages), it also seems to play into the tropes of the “non-American” book while at the same time being very much an American piece of fiction, published in the U.S. (by Coffeehouse Press) by an American writer (you might say he’s more than American now, as he lives in Texas).

Saint Sebastian’s Abyss seems written for readers of Enrique Vila Matas, Cesar Aira, Roberto Bolano, and Clarice Lispector—that is, American readers of books (often novellas, if you’d like to use that dirty word) in translation. It has the feel of the academic and social politics of “The Part About the Critics” from Bolano’s 2666, but also the absurdity of Aira’s The Literary Conference or the round-about logistics of the plot of Vila Matas’s The Illogic of Kassel. It would be unkind to say that Haber is simply doing an American version of one of these books in translation. More accurately, Haber has found that in American literature, there is ample room for books that, in being small, can be more than just novels while being able to be read in a day or two. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss has 76 chapters, each about a page to a page and half long (I will have to check with Book It! corporate to see if it qualifies me for a free pizza). 

But what makes Haber’s book feel like it contains, as Aira puts it, “an accumulation of time” is its sense of a larger, expanding world. The painting at its center, Count Hugo Beckenbauer’s “Saint Sebastian’s Abyss,” is a fictitious work of art. But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a reader who didn’t have a small stretch of doubt while reading the book as to whether it really were made up. Haber supports our furtive fact-checking with an equally fictitious bibliography at the end of the book. It gives this short novel a sense of breadth and depth, a sense of time to it that makes it more than a novella, whatever that is. 

Haber’s work joins not just the growing list of small books coming from outside the U.S., but an increasing number of books from small and medium-sized domestic publishers that see space for books that a reader can slip in a pocket and read in an afternoon. Perhaps, like the renaissance of television’s “limited series” in the last decade, the time of the small book is upon us. Maybe market forces make this unlikely. It seems like the insistence of the reading line, the assertion of “A Novel,” is holding something back from the possibilities of the pleasure of small books through its insistence on length. But perhaps if, like Aira’s magician, we understand time as not just spent reading, but as the expanding, expansive time of the world in the book, readers will begin to see even slim volumes as story enough. Then the novella as a less-than genre can die, and the small book can live.