Book recommendations that meet a specific criteria...

December 6, 2006 7:08 PM

Looking for inspiration in two kinds of books. Perhaps you've got some recommendations? 1) Novels with very short "chapters" or fragments or pieces, that combine to make a whole; 2) Books boldly written, whether that be a writer being bold with timelines, punctuation, language, etc. (examples of both types of books inside).

I'm trying to finish up a novel. The problem is that I seem to only be able to write extremely short passages. (For example, I recently sent 3 pieces off for publication and their total word count was under 600.) Though I know I shouldn't, I'm finding (my knowledge of) the lack of work previously published like this to be rather disheartening and therefore resistence-fostering.

Have you got any examples of published novels that are the sum of a series of very short "entries"? (Note that I'm not looking for short story collections that make up "novels".) Three examples I can think of are Stephen Marche's Raymond and Hannah, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's War & War, and maybe Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.

I also seem to get much inspiration out of writers who are bold with presentation (though I don't consider myself to be). Examples would be Hubert Selby Jr, Stephen Dixon (I), James Kellman (How Late...), Kathe Koja (Kink), Julio Cortazar (Hopscotch), etc. I'm not really looking for things that are necessarily difficult or "impenetrable" to the average reader (ie, Ulysses), just writing that you'd consider bold.

Thanks!

posted by dobbs to media & arts (54 comments total)

most famous 'very short entry' one that comes to my mind is Kurt Vonnegut's cat's cradle...
posted by mdn at 7:11 PM on December 6, 2006

Douglas Coupland's Life After God
posted by pompomtom at 7:14 PM on December 6, 2006

The Bride Stripped Bare by Nikki Gemmel

Written in the 2nd person, short chapters

(perhaps this is one of the examples you are disheartened by, though)
posted by clh at 7:21 PM on December 6, 2006

Bukowski comes to mind.
posted by nitsuj at 7:21 PM on December 6, 2006

Short chapters:
Donald Barthelme's Snow White
Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Zero
posted by hydrophonic at 7:23 PM on December 6, 2006

2nd the Vonnegut, a lot of his books are divided into short segments. Tim O'Brien's books "If I Die in a Combat Zone" and "The Things They Carried" are also subdivided. Each 'chapter' relates to the others sometimes as part of a story, sometimes just loosely, and they get pretty intense.
posted by Science! at 7:26 PM on December 6, 2006

Madeleine is Sleeping by Sara Bynum is a beautiful book in brief chapters.

Good luck finishing!
posted by escabeche at 7:30 PM on December 6, 2006

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is made up of multiple individual stories that all somehow (and in some cases, rather loosely) connect. I would also say it's very bold, because each story is very differently written, and at least one of them is written in a peculiar dialect, while another is made up entirely of letters.
posted by nekton at 7:32 PM on December 6, 2006

Thanks for the answers so far, but I guess I should clarify "short" for the sake of the question. I'm talking "chapters" that are paragraphs or lines long, not pages (usually less than a page each), though obviously if you know stuff that's longer but still "short", please keep 'em coming.
posted by dobbs at 7:33 PM on December 6, 2006

Erm, I actually meant Douglas Copeland's Polaroids from the Dead.

(though they're both good...)
posted by pompomtom at 7:33 PM on December 6, 2006

Death on the Installment Plan by Celine is made up of phrases separated by ellipsis.

In a less literary world, the crime wroter Ken Bruen usually uses very short chapters.
posted by Bookhouse at 7:36 PM on December 6, 2006

I believe Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard has mostly short chapters. How short, I am not sure, most chapters are a few paperback pages long if I am recalling correclty. Please forgive if this is still too long.

I also recall a book by the writer, John Taylor having short chapters. Falling: A Story of One Marriage.
posted by LoriFLA at 7:36 PM on December 6, 2006

The Transit of Venus...
posted by LoriFLA at 7:39 PM on December 6, 2006

Here's an Amazon shot of Marche's book, which shows the shortness (and also the interesting presentation, I guess). You'll have to click left a couple times to get to page 1.

Again, thanks for the answers, folks! Please keep 'em coming. I'm logged into my library's Hold Page in another tab!
posted by dobbs at 7:39 PM on December 6, 2006

"My mother is a fish."
posted by jdroth at 7:39 PM on December 6, 2006

Just to be clear, that's a single chapter from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
posted by jdroth at 7:40 PM on December 6, 2006

Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever.
posted by Airhen at 7:45 PM on December 6, 2006

Not that short chapters, but have you read BS Johnson's The Unfortunates. Shortish chapters, each bound separately and then presented loose in a box, to be read in whichever order the reader chooses. Certainly fits the 'fragmented' part!
posted by csg77 at 7:53 PM on December 6, 2006

Almost anything by David Markson fits the bill quite nicely. Here is a sample from This is not a novel.
posted by Falconetti at 7:58 PM on December 6, 2006

seconding madeleine is sleeping!
posted by soma lkzx at 8:14 PM on December 6, 2006

Port Tropique by Barry Gifford
posted by BigSky at 8:16 PM on December 6, 2006

In Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg, each chapter is one page. The writing is bold in a sort of aggressively stylistic way, if that makes any sense.

I haven't read any of it, but isn't John Dos Passos' USA trilogy written in short snips? It's definitely experimental in its prose style.
posted by expialidocious at 8:23 PM on December 6, 2006

Bookhouse writes "Death on the Installment Plan by Celine is made up of phrases separated by ellipsis."

Yes, and most novels are made up of sentences separated by periods.

Seriously, though -- a novel I found particularly bold was David Markson's Springer's Progress. Plus his Wittgenstein's Mistress, Reader's Block, and This is Not a Novel. These are all made up of short passages (the passages in Springer's Progress are not as short as the others).

Cortazar's A Certain Lucas was made up of short chapters.
posted by jayder at 8:24 PM on December 6, 2006

Oh, also, Evan S. Connell's Notes from a Bottle Found on a Beach at Carmel and Points for a Compass Rose are made up of disconnected, but thematically related, short passages.

I can't recommend the first one highly enough. The second one, I've just flipped through.
posted by jayder at 8:26 PM on December 6, 2006

Boldy written: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Calvino.
posted by cushie at 8:28 PM on December 6, 2006

A very uniquely written/formatted (although not necessarily brief) book to take a look at its House of Leaves.
posted by Kololo at 8:53 PM on December 6, 2006

Not a great book at all, but _Life of Pi_ has some paragraph-length "chapters."

As for bold (and great), I'll toss Nathalie Sarraute into the ring. Her _Between Life and Death_ has stuck with me in ways other (great) books have failed to do.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:00 PM on December 6, 2006

For bold presentation, try Eric Kraft's Little Follies or Where Do You Stop? They're funny. I wish more people knew them.

For short sections, check out Sarah Sheard's Almost Japanese.

Incidentally, Almost Japanese came out in 1985 -- the same year as Ann Ireland's A Certain Mr. Takahashi. This was a stunning coincidence: both authors had been friends and neighbors as girls, and both wrote fictionalized versions of the same episode from their Toronto childhood. (They both developed a freight train of a crush on Seiji Ozawa, who'd moved into their neighborhood.) The two girls had fallen out of touch; neither had the faintest idea what the other was writing about. Ireland's was a much more conventional novel; it won the prizes and got the screenplay adaptation. I tried to find some reference to the coincidence online, but it looks like people have forgotten all about it.

Plus I got to interview Sheard for CIUT, and of course I asked her why she'd chosen to write her novel in those little chunks. I expected some highfalutin' explanation, but it turned out she'd been working at some sort of office job while she was writing it, and that those chunks were exactly the length that she could manage at work, given her conscience, her attention span, and the size of a screenful of text back then. It worked for the material, and just ran with it.
posted by tangerine at 9:09 PM on December 6, 2006 [1 favorite]

Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' and 'Mr Palomar' has short chapters.
posted by dhruva at 9:10 PM on December 6, 2006

If I'm not mistaken, you have almost exactly described Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon - which is a book everyone ought to read in the first place.
posted by EatTheWeak at 9:20 PM on December 6, 2006

You mentioned sending out three pieces out under 600 words; this works out to around 200 words per piece (I am very curious as to who accepts that for publication). That said, you may be asking the wrong question: I don't believe that writing "extremely short passages" (please, let's call them paragraphs and not "entries") is a problem; perhaps the issue is how to string them together into a novel.

Do you have a framework of the characters/plot/point/etc. of the novel? If you do, fine. If you're writing disjointed unrelated paragraphs, maybe you need to rethink what you're trying to say as a whole.

As for the "bold with presentation" thing... I personally would wait on the creative presentation until you have something.
posted by sfkiddo at 9:51 PM on December 6, 2006

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
posted by winston at 9:57 PM on December 6, 2006

Boldly written: Kafka on The Shore, by Murakami Haruki. The writing is simply amazing. He does wild things with varying points of view, perspective, timelines, etc.
posted by gt2 at 11:07 PM on December 6, 2006

er, I wrote that backwards. Murakami is his last name.
posted by gt2 at 12:07 AM on December 7, 2006

If Hopscotch counts, then Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars certainly should.

Mark Z Danielewski does bold things with presentation, but if you don't like him, you're going to think it's self indulgent gimmickry. I think he's awesome though.
posted by juv3nal at 12:40 AM on December 7, 2006

There's the god-awful random capitalisation in James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" - that might be considered bold writing (also bold: passing it off as non-fiction). It's more a 'what not to do' than inspiration, though.

I think 'The Periodic Table' had interesting chapter structures. I can't remember how short or long they were, though.
posted by Lucie at 1:06 AM on December 7, 2006

Bold in a timeline sense: The Time Traveler's Wife. I love this book, and it's surprisingly strong for a first novel.

I haven't read any of your examples -- I tend to read trash more than literature -- so I hope this isn't way off base for what you're looking for.
posted by nadise at 1:22 AM on December 7, 2006

1) e Matt Beaumont. Modern version of the epistolary novel, entirely in emails, some of which are only a sentence. It's a fun read about an advertising agency.
2) Like csg77 I thought of BS Johnson but would recommend Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry. This includes accounting ledgers! (Read Frank Kermode on BS Johnson and experimental writing here. Lots of examples of 2) in that piece, including Tristram Shandy of course.)
posted by boudicca at 4:48 AM on December 7, 2006

As an example of the first, check out Adverbs by Daniel Handler. Each chapter is its own little story, but in the end they all relate to each other, and characters from one chapter will show up in another, and sometimes it was surprising for me to suddenly realize that this person in this story was also that person in a previous story. I don't know if this is really what you were looking for at all, but it's a great book at any rate.
posted by Nedroid at 6:13 AM on December 7, 2006

Most books by Barry Gifford, but particularly "Wild At Heart", "Baby Cat-Face", "Sinaloa Story", and other books from the same period of his work.

These should actually satisfy both your requests-- very short chapters, many of which standing totally on their own, and seriously bold dialect and style choices.
posted by hermitosis at 6:33 AM on December 7, 2006

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano consists entirely of short snippets.
posted by calumet43 at 6:59 AM on December 7, 2006

Annie Salem by Mac Wellman has a scope and timeline that expands and collapses in very strange ways. Quite bold, and often forgotten as Wellman is better known for his plays. Bonus: I think it also has some fairly short chapters.

Gordon Lish's Extravaganza has some short chapters, and the longer ones are built of odd cycles of the same jokes repeated in different ways, which is quite bold.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon has a huge timeline, sometimes jumping millions of years between chapters. Not sure it's really your style though.

Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books are all about timelines, with many (often distorted) references to various revolutions and cultural touchpoints of the 20th century. I especially recommend The Condition of Muzak.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 7:27 AM on December 7, 2006

Anything by Ken Bruen. Also, Evan Connell - mentioned above - uses very short chapters in both his Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge books. Well worth checking out. I believe White Jazz by James Ellroy also comes close to this kind of style...
posted by theinsectsarewaiting at 7:52 AM on December 7, 2006

What you're describing is actually a genre called flash fiction. That's just the wikipedia link but it cites some authors and journals that should be worth investigating.

I'm not too familiar with the genre as a whole but I recommend Amy Hempel, who writes exclusively short-short fiction.
posted by tatiana wishbone at 8:07 AM on December 7, 2006

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia comes in short (sometimes a sentence, sometimes a page) chapters told from the perspective of different characters. I'd also consider it to be bold, in that the author takes occasional advantage of non-standard formatting to add art to the story. Hard to explain, but really amazing. Plus the story's fascinating, and the writing is beautiful.
posted by vytae at 8:34 AM on December 7, 2006

I second Mary Robison. Why Did I Ever is my favorite. But some of her earlier works also have very short chapters. It was the first book I thought of when I read your question. Another one worth looking at is This is not a novel by Markson.
posted by rodz at 10:27 AM on December 7, 2006

Janice Galloway does some fascinating stuff with the physical text in The Trick is to Keep Breathing.
posted by catesbie at 11:56 AM on December 7, 2006

I didn't see this one yet. All it is composed of are short chapters. Each chapter is a dream. Incredible book that you must glance thru if not read entirely, for your situation:

Einstein's Dreams
posted by iurodivii at 12:12 PM on December 7, 2006

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. (1760)

(V.4) CHAP. V. (in its entirety)

IS this a fit time, said my father to
himself, to talk of PENSIONS and
GRENADIERS ?


(from CHAP. X)

IS it not a shame to make two chapters
of what passed in going down one
pair of stairs ? for we are got no farther
yet than to the first landing, and there
are fifteen more steps down to the bot-
tom ; and for aught I know, as my fa-
ther and my uncle Toby are in a talking
humour, there may be as many chapters
as steps ; -- let that be as it will, Sir, I
can no more help it than my destiny : --
A sudden impulse comes across me ----
drop the curtain, Shandy -- I drop it ----
Strike a line here across the paper,Tristram
-- I strike it -- and hey for a new chapter !
posted by nasreddin at 1:56 PM on December 7, 2006

Would you be open to prose poetry?

I highly recommend Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.
posted by gennessee at 4:30 PM on December 7, 2006

Second Cryptonomicon (though not as short as you want).

Also -- I only flipped through this in a bookstore once, but -- I think Sam Shephard's Motel Chronicles might fall in the short category. Can't remember if the pieces add up to a novel or just, like, a book of short-short stories. But check him out.
posted by salvia at 5:44 PM on December 7, 2006

Thanks everyone for your answers. Way too many good answers here to mark favorites but I've booked a bunch of the titles from the library and picked up some at the store.

Thank you!
posted by dobbs at 9:50 AM on December 8, 2006

dobbs, I'm late to the party, but I'll second Anne Carson—as ever—and recommend The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, as well as Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro and Jesus' Son. Elias Canetti also wrote dense epigrammatic works in the aphoristic tradition, but I've only read his essayistic stuff and Crowds and Power, so I can't speak for Auto-da-Fé, his only novel. I'd also strongly encourage you to check out Jonathan Carroll's short stories, collected in The Panic Hand.
posted by cgc373 at 1:33 AM on December 11, 2006

David Markson's Vanishing Point is simply a series of intriguing facts about famous composers, writers, etc.

Michael Ondaatje's poem The Elimination Dance. You just have to read it; it's easier to "get" right away when you see it than to explain.

Richard Brautigan's most famous stuff, mostly in the omnibus editions, is terse and broken up clearly. Ditto Barthelme's story collections.

More as I think of them...
posted by ifjuly at 9:25 AM on January 27, 2007