The Horla

Description

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognised by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In "The Art of the Novella Series", Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. This chilling tale of one man's descent into madness was published shortly before the author was institutionalized for insanity, and so "The Horla" has inevitably been seen as informed by Guy de Maupassant's mental illness. While such speculation is murky, it is clear that de Maupassant - hailed alongside Chekhov as father of the short story - was at the peak of his powers in this innovative precursor of first-person psychological fiction. Indeed, he worked for years on "The Horla's" themes and form, first drafting it as "Letter from a Madman," then telling it from a doctor's point of view, before finally releasing the terrified protagonist to speak for himself in its devastating final version. In a brilliant new translation, all three versions appear here as a single volume for the first time.

Guy de Maupassant (1850- 1893), after serving in the Franco- Prussian War, became a close friend of Flaubert and his circle. He wrote hundreds of short stories as well as novels and verse. In his later years, he suffered from mental illness, and he died in an asylum.

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read." -Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer "Small wonders." -Time Out London "[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works." -Adam Begley, The New York Observer "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series." -The New Yorker "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed-tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are." -KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package." -The Wall Street Journal