Short Little Difficult Books

Novels that challenge with style, story, or form that you can read in a day.

A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it “brilliant” (Esquire), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life? More info here.

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László Krasznahorkai’s recent Nobel Prize win reignited the perpetual debates about “difficult literature.” Krasznahorkai, if you don’t know, is famous for writing lengthy, dense books with extremely long—as in sometimes hundreds of pages long—sentences. The kind of books that a certain type of reader takes up as a challenge and another type of reader (or at least social media poster who identifies as a reader) considers fundamentally fraudulent because books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob! Obviously, I think the latter position is silly. Challenging oneself is fun. Difficult tasks are pleasurable. Aren’t learning new skills and trying new things sort of the whole point of life? Or at least a good chunk of the point.

Perhaps that’s an old-fashioned view. Last week, Michelle Santiago Cortés at The Cut had a depressing article about how people are using ChatGPT not just to skip schoolwork or scam people—understandable if unethical uses—but even to cheat at hobbies and leisure activities. Using ChatGPT to skip puzzles in escape rooms or posting AI-generated crocheted items you didn’t crochet to crafting subreddits. I have no doubt some people use LLMs to fill out their crossword or sudoku puzzles while they sip their morning coffee. Perhaps one thing AI is revealing is that a certain percentage of the population has no real interest in doing, learning, or enjoying anything at all. Oh well. Takes all kinds. To each their own. Yada yada. Perhaps the world needs shriveled-up slug people too.

Back to books. I find “difficult” books worthwhile for providing you with a challenge to conquer, but its good to remember the difficulty isn’t the point. Books that deviate from the norms of storytelling in style, structure, or form allow for different reading experiences. Extremely long sentences, strange syntax, unusual structures, etc., don’t exist to punish readers but to provide other aesthetic experiences and different types of stories. Story is never separable from execution. So-called difficult books couldn’t be made into easy books without ruining them. You couldn’t transform a Krasznahorkai into a beach read by adding a couple hundred paragraph breaks and periods. You’d be changing the entire experience.

Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick

I also find it strange to even worry about “pretentious” readers or “brodernists” hyping themselves up to read some new, huge tome (Schattenfroh this season it seems) in an age when few people read anything at all. Reading a very long book always takes some dedication, some challenging of yourself. So what? That’s good and often rewarding. Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my life. Anyway, enough critics have defended long and difficult books. So, I thought I’d write about the pleasures of short and difficult books.

Last week when I was headed to the airport I grabbed a small book from my to-read stack: The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated by David Bellos). I’ve long admired Perec but didn’t actually know anything about this specific novel. When I opened it, I learned it was Krasznahorkian in that the entire novel was a single sentence. Seeing the dense, unpunctuated prose did make me want to reach for my phone. But I soon lost that feeling once I actually began reading. The Art of Asking is a delightful and quick read. Only 80 pages in fact. The single sentence structure is not some random choice but integral to the themes and entire project. The 1968 text apparently originated with an invite from IBM for writers to make works inspired by computers. Perec’s novel is structured as a computer program’s logic of how an office drone employee might request and get a raise, which instead of a choose-your-own-adventure is written “to impose on the reader the recursive iteration of all the steps an imagined computer would make as it implemented the instructions contained in the program” (as translator David Bellos says in the introduction). The result is funnier and more human than that sounds. But the text would be something entirely different without this single-sentence logic loop form.

It made me think about what other books might fit into the idea of short and difficult novels. (I will admit I read a lot of short books in part because of my phone-and-internet-brainrot attention span. But that’s not the only reason. I read to teach and it’s easier to teach short books because the students are more likely to read the whole thing and I’m more likely to reread for prep.)

One subcategory of this non-genre would be Oulipian projects. Perec’s book fits here, as he was a central member of that group, which used constraints to generate new types of literature. The most famous example is a different Perec book translated as A Void that was written entirely without the letter e. Oulipo’s co-founder Raymond Queneau has a book to include here called Exercises in Style (trans. by Barbara Wright), which retells an intentionally banal story 99 times. Most are only a page, so the book is short, though many readers would find it difficult for having no real plot or character and just 99 retellings in different styles. But, if you are a writer it is inspiring to see how style changes story and the endless variations you can create from even the most banal anecdote.

Invisible Architecture

I’m going to have to include Italo Calvino’s Oulipian novel Invisible Cities (trans. by William Weaver), since it is a foundational text for me. The book also has no real characters or plot—so is challenging for some readers—and instead consists mostly of 55 descriptions of imagined cities. Two other formally odd books I love: Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (trans. by Megan McDowell), structured as a standardized test with e.g. chapters of fill-in-the-blank questions, and Olga Ravn’s The Employees (trans. by Martin Aitken) that takes the form of employee interview transcripts on a spaceship that has encountered bizarre alien life. A reader reminded me that one of my favorite authors, Kobo Abe, has a very fun and formally bizarre novel called The Box Man (trans. by E. Dale Saunders). We might call these novels that are difficult in form, being written in unusual ways to tell stories without the traditional throughline of characters progressing through a linear plot.

Then there are short books that are difficult in style. The prose itself is the source of difficulty. Short books from challenging stylists are often a good entry point into their works. Indeed, my first Krasznahorkai was the very short The Last Wolf & Herman (trans. by John Batki and George Szirtes) although that is two stories and not a novel. Thomas Bernhard tends to toss in some punctuation and a few paragraphs, but also writes dense and structurally unusual novels. Most of them are basically ranting monologues by misanthropes while the present action plot is reduced to almost nothing, such as a man stewing in a wing chair while looking around a party. They’re fantastic. You can’t go wrong with the short The Loser (trans. by Mark M. Anderson) as an introduction to Thomas Bernhard. Toni Morrison’s brief Sula—rereleased with a new cover this month—is one of her best works and a great starting place for her lush and lyrical style. I don’t really think of Morrison as difficult per se, but I remember the minor controversy after Oprah said she found herself needing to reread passages to understand them and Morrison replying “That, my dear, is called reading.” People got miffed about that. Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is the perfect starter book to see if you enjoy McCarthy’s maximalist prose and macabre images before tackling the longer Blood Meridian. (If you’ve only read his later, spare novels like The Road and All the Pretty Horses you might not know McCarthy’s early books are written in a very different and denser style.)

Then you have books whose difficulty is the storytelling—by which I mean books with confusing events, surrealist dream logic, and elliptical plots. A lot of readers find surreal writing difficult, though personally I eat it up. Some excellent short novels that fit this include Juan Rulfo’s haunted and brilliant Pedro Páramo (trans. by Douglas J .Weatherford, Stanley Crawford’s surreal prose poem novel Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine, Leonora Carrington’s truly Surreal only novel The Hearing Trumpet, Kafka’s unfinished-but-masterpiece The Trial, Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending science-fiction novel Ubik, John Hawkes’s experimental novel The Lime Twig, and Christina Rivera Garza’s poetic noir novel The Taiga Syndrome (trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana).

Fear of the Surreal

I’m also tempted to add the category of short books that are difficult because of their subject matter—e.g., Yukio Mishima’s erotic ode to seppuku Patriotism (trans. by Geoffrey W Sargent)—but I fear that could get dangerous fast. So, I’ll end it there. The above are just some short, perhaps difficult, but definitely brilliant novels I love and would recommend if you want a short reading challenge sometime.

There are countless more one could list, of course. Feel free to do so in the comments.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is available to buy! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.