I enjoy a search challenge, so when I spoke with Minnesota writer Lori O’Dea about her new work Little Cavendish, and why novellas are hard to publish, I knew I had to compile a good list of Minnesota novellas.
Little Cavendish is a great place to start. The main character, Iris Cavendish, works as a flight attendant and tries to get in contact with her younger brother, whom she has not seen since she left their difficult family home. As Iris starts a new, independent living chapter in her life, she goes on a very satisfying homemaking set-up that reminded me of The Boxcar Children and the scenes in Stone Butch Blues where Jess furnishes and decorates her beloved apartment.
(If you haven’t listened to the episode, it’s a good one!)
What qualifies as a novella? Something in between a short story and a novel. Robert Lee Brewer writing for Writer’s Digest says novella word count falls between 15,000 and 40,000 words. Some fiction contests allow novellas as short as 7,500. That’s a really big range, but I don’t make the literature rules; I just write about them!
The first Minnesota novella I found was A Little Norsk by Hamlin Garland.
A Little Norsk (alternative title Ol Pap’s Flaxen) by Hamlin Garland, is a pioneer adoption story that takes place during a deadly prairie winter. I also found an excellent literary criticism article in Midwest Quarterly that offers a queer reading of Garland’s bachelor homesteaders.
Writing in Cleveland Review of Books, J. Arthur Boyle summarizes The Girl by Meridel Le Seuer:
A not-so-brief summary: The eponymous Girl—as she’s referred to by everyone, including her mother—finds less-than-legal work in a prohibition beerjoint in Depression-era Minneapolis. This job also functions as her passage into adulthood. Chief is the question of sex, and men. Girl seeks a state of “knowing” with the help of three other women: Belle, the maternal proprietress of the beerjoint; Clara, a fellow server, a cast-off wandering through social systems and sex work and hoping to one day leverage it into class ascension; and Amelia, the Workers Alliance organizer, the collectivizer and historical consciousness for all of them.
Also! Poet Mark Nowak introduced me to Meridel Le Seuer’s work when he was on Read Minnesota Books to discuss his latest collection.
A classic! Originally published in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is out of copyright, and available to read for free online. It’s a satirical story about a family who owns a mountain-sized diamond, but has to keep it a secret because of supply and demand economics (if everyone knows there’s a diamond as big as the Ritz, those diamonds won’t be worth very much anymore). Pairs well with my post about moneyed Minnesota families.
Minnesota mystery author Larry Millett wrote three novellas and bundled them together in a novel-length book collection titled Mysterious Tales of Old Minneapolis, published last year by University of Minnesota Press.
This book bundled two novellas by John Hassler together. In a Star Tribune review from 2004, Pamela Miller panned The Staggerford Murders: “It's an amusing read if you're willing to believe that murder is funny and that old fogies are better than forensics at solving them” but praised The Life and Death of Nancy Clancy's Nephew as “one of Hassler’s finest works.”
Spirit Pass by Angela Ellen Grey contains three novella mysteries about a tribal detective investigating cases of missing and murdered indigenous women
Road Trip by Lynette D’Amico follows two travelers through Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Writer and academic John Pistelli earned a PhD from University of Minnesota and has published a novella titled The Ecstasy of Michaela with Valhalla Press and self-published a novella about the COVID-19 pandemic early in 2020, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House: A Novella, of which a sample chapter is available on his Substack
The Line by Stone Lovecharm is a novella about a “former Satyr masquerading as a Minnesota retiree” available through Indie Minnesota. Do you know Indie Minnesota? It’s a database full of self-published ebooks by Minnesota writers.
Mark Munger, a northern Minnesota writer and owner of Cloquet River Press, published Kulkuri (Vagabond), a collection of short fiction that includes a novella titled “The Angle.”
I have to think that novellas might be on their way to having a real moment, considering our current age of short-form everything catered to truncated attention spans.
How about you? Do you like this not-quite-a-short-story-not-yet-a-novel category? Have I missed any novellas you like, authored by a Minnesota writer or set in Minnesota? Let me know! Happy reading!
This is a great list!