Novella

I've never been much of an Ian McEwan fan, but his post this week at the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog may make me think again. Here, McEwan writes in defense of that finest of all literary forms, the novella: “between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter.” ...

"Breakfast at Tiffany's," the beloved novella by Truman Capote, has hit Broadway with a rising star in the role of Holly Golightly -- HBO's "Game of Thrones" actress Emilia Carke. The new stage version, by playwright Richard Greenberg, opened this week at the Cort Theatre in New York. Directed by Sean Mathias, the play is the first attempt to adapt the novella for Broadway since the disastrous musical version that closed before it officially opened in 1966. Clarke is making her Broadway debut as the high-society party girl whom Capote described as an "American geisha.

"Haven," a new series premiering Friday on Syfy, is like the Syfy series "Eureka" in that it concerns a small piney town populated by the abnormally gifted. And it is like the Syfy series "Warehouse 13" in that it is like "The X-Files," setting two good-looking officers of the law — male and female, local cop and federal agent — against otherworldly phenomena. She is open to the supernatural; he has a condition that makes it impossible for him to feel pain. She's an orphan, he has father issues.

PARK CITY, Utah - Writer Doris Lessing was 92 years old when French filmmaker Anne Fontaine met her last year, and she made quite an impression. "She's wild," Fontaine says. "She has a look I'd never seen before: eyes that go into your head, like a fakir, so intense, not hiding anything. " The two women were speaking because Fontaine was going to turn Lessing's novella "The Grandmothers" into a film and the Nobel Prize-winning author had some unexpected advice for adapting her story of two women looking back on their lives.

BOSTON - Donald Crockett is not the only composer partial to poetry, but his affinity runs especially deep. So much so that his first opera, "The Face," which will have its premiere at the Aratani / Japan America Theatre on Saturday, uses poems as source material. The poems in question are by David St. John, who like Crockett is a professor at USC. But the composer's admiration for his colleague's work transcends academic loyalty. "Music figures in David's poetry, and he's very attentive to relationships - particularly love," Crockett said, sitting in a hotel lobby near the New England Conservatory of Music, where rehearsals for "The Face" were taking place last month.

On the last night of the S.S. Coachella, Josh Tillman sat before a couple of dozen fiction fans, a rare sight on a ship devoted to irony-soaked hedonism. They'd assembled in Michael's, the manly smoking-jacket-and-Scotch bar aboard the ship, for an event drolly billed as “Father John Misty reads selections from his favorite works of literature.” But Tillman, the singer-songwriter behind FJM, read from the novella printed in nearly illegible font in the liner notes of his album “Fear Fun.”  It's a smart, bitterly amusing story about a guy sent to hell, where Satan  shows him how to get around the place.

"Breakfast at Tiffany's," the beloved novella by Truman Capote, has hit Broadway with a rising star in the role of Holly Golightly -- HBO's "Game of Thrones" actress Emilia Carke. The new stage version, by playwright Richard Greenberg, opened this week at the Cort Theatre in New York. Directed by Sean Mathias, the play is the first attempt to adapt the novella for Broadway since the disastrous musical version that closed before it officially opened in 1966. Clarke is making her Broadway debut as the high-society party girl whom Capote described as an "American geisha.

"Bilingual TV Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come" (Dec. 10) and, hopefully, to Calendar as well. How about some articles and critiques about Spanish-language programming? For example, a beautiful novella recently concluded on KMEX, Channel 34, "Dona Bela." Now the stars of that novella, and many of the ensemble players, are in the current novella "La Marquesa de Santos." I would like very much to know something about the stars (Maite Proenza and Gracindo Junior) and the entire production.

The world is going to the dogs, you say? A look at the clever novella turned play "Heart of a Dog" might get you thinking: If only it would. In the 1925 novella by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, human glands are implanted into a dog, transforming the once companionable animal into a skulking, sometimes violent beast.

Mark Z. Danielewski, author of "House of Leaves" and other mind-scrambling tomes, will perform his limited-edition novella, "The Fifty Year Sword," as a special Halloween treat; candy corn, if you will, for the literary soul. In order to illuminate his creepy ghost story involving a seamstress recovering from a painful divorce on an East Texas ranch, the writer will call on a mix of performers, including actors and the oft-neglected shadow artist. No one ? we repeat, no one ? will make it out alive.

On the last night of the S.S. Coachella, Josh Tillman sat before a couple of dozen fiction fans, a rare sight on a ship devoted to irony-soaked hedonism. They'd assembled in Michael's, the manly smoking-jacket-and-Scotch bar aboard the ship, for an event drolly billed as “Father John Misty reads selections from his favorite works of literature.” But Tillman, the singer-songwriter behind FJM, read from the novella printed in nearly illegible font in the liner notes of his album “Fear Fun.”  It's a smart, bitterly amusing story about a guy sent to hell, where Satan  shows him how to get around the place.

I've never been much of an Ian McEwan fan, but his post this week at the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog may make me think again. Here, McEwan writes in defense of that finest of all literary forms, the novella: “between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter.” ...

BOSTON - Donald Crockett is not the only composer partial to poetry, but his affinity runs especially deep. So much so that his first opera, "The Face," which will have its premiere at the Aratani / Japan America Theatre on Saturday, uses poems as source material. The poems in question are by David St. John, who like Crockett is a professor at USC. But the composer's admiration for his colleague's work transcends academic loyalty. "Music figures in David's poetry, and he's very attentive to relationships - particularly love," Crockett said, sitting in a hotel lobby near the New England Conservatory of Music, where rehearsals for "The Face" were taking place last month.

You can take Walter Mosley out of Los Angeles - in fact, Mosley did so himself, moving to New York decades ago - but you can't take L.A. out of Walter Mosley. The master of several genres keeps the city present, from his Easy Rawlins detective novels set in black postwar Los Angeles to the Greek-myths-in-South-Central elements in one of the two novellas in his latest volume. Mosley appeared to wrap it up with Rawlins in "Blonde Faith" in 2007, but five years later, he's found more for his most famous detective to do, just as Mosley has for himself.

Smut Stories Alan Bennett Picador: 152 pp., $14 paper Alan Bennett may be best known - both in this country and in his native England - as a playwright ("The History Boys," "The Madness of George III") and a television writer, but for me, his signature work remains the 2007 short novel "The Uncommon Reader. " In that book, Queen Elizabeth II discovers the discomforting pleasures of literature, with results that are disruptive to say the least. Before long, she is missing appointments and neglecting her appearance in the interest of getting a few more minutes to read.

Train Dreams A Novella Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 116 pp., $18 It's a curious thing about Denis Johnson: For a writer I admire as much as (if not more than) any of his contemporaries, his books rarely come without faults. This may be most true of his Vietnam epic "Tree of Smoke," which never quite coalesces into something more than a pastiche, despite having won a 2007 National Book Award. Yet it also marks earlier novels, including the often brilliant "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man," an investigation of God as "the chief conspirator" that ultimately loses track of its internal logic, and "The Stars at Noon," which, taking place in 1980s Nicaragua, veers in and out of a beautiful derangement.

Sunday afternoon, the Pacific Composers Forum gave a concert of five pieces by four of its members at Mount St. Mary's College in Brentwood. A polite, sizable crowd attended. It would be superfluous to describe these pieces individually since, like paper dolls, all five are stylistically and compositionally similar. All but one are scored for clarinet, harp, violin and cello. All sway lullingly to a steady ostinato accompaniment played by the harp.

Something unfortunate happens when the structure of a book competes with its content, leaving the reader as distanced from the characters as a tourist is from the natives. She can see them, observe their habits, listen to their conversations, but that is not the same as experiencing their daily lives. In "Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand," Ursula K.

The first Stephen King book I ever read was "Different Seasons," a set of four novellas published in 1982. It's a hell of a collection, featuring " Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," "Apt Pupil" and "The Body," the last of which inspired the 1986 movie "Stand by Me. " The book remains, along with "Misery" and "The Shining," among the best writing King has done. The secret pleasure, however, of "Different Seasons" is its afterword, in which King characterizes the novella as "an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic," with no clear borders ?

Mark Z. Danielewski, author of "House of Leaves" and other mind-scrambling tomes, will perform his limited-edition novella, "The Fifty Year Sword," as a special Halloween treat; candy corn, if you will, for the literary soul. In order to illuminate his creepy ghost story involving a seamstress recovering from a painful divorce on an East Texas ranch, the writer will call on a mix of performers, including actors and the oft-neglected shadow artist. No one ? we repeat, no one ? will make it out alive.