Seven Short Books from the Literature Shelf
A reading list of seven public-domain works — fiction, a novella, and one practical guide — for readers who want something substantial to carry in short sittings.
These seven books share a shelf but not a single subject. Most are fiction — two of them French, translated into English; two of them by the same English author of long, plotted novels; one a collection of short American tales; one a set of very short pieces. The seventh is not fiction at all, but a practical manual on how to hold your attention on one thing. What they have in common is that each is free to read here in full, and each can be started without any preparation beyond curiosity. This list is for a reader who wants to sample several kinds of writing at once rather than commit to one long book — and who is happy to pick up wherever a description lands.
Fables — Robert Louis Stevenson
This is a small collection of short pieces. The first of them is a curious idea: after a chapter of Treasure Island, two of that novel's own characters — Long John Silver and Captain Smollett — step outside the story to have a pipe and argue with each other. Silver's position is that off duty, there is no call to keep up what he calls the morality business; the Captain's is blunter.
“You’re a damned rogue, my man,” said the Captain.
I.—THE PERSONS OF THE TALE.
If you have read Treasure Island, this collection turns its figures inside out and lets them talk about their own status as invented people. If you have not, it still works as a set of brief, strange sketches you can read in a few minutes each.
Whirligigs — O. Henry
A book of short stories that opens by teasing its own reader. The narrator notes the common trick of a writer swearing a tale is true — that Truth is stranger than Fiction — and then cheerfully undercuts the adage. He sets his first story going with a Spanish purser on a fruit steamer who swore he had the facts from a U. S. vice-consul, a person who, the narrator adds, could not possibly have known half of them. That wink at the machinery of storytelling sets the tone: these are tales told by someone who enjoys the telling and does not mind you seeing him do it.
A Rogue's Life — Wilkie Collins
Collins introduces this himself as a story written and published, in parts, long before he reissued it. In his introductory words he explains that the Rogue was favourably received in its first form, that he long delayed republishing while meaning to enlarge the hero's adventures in Australia, and that in the end he let the story stand with its original conclusion, adding only occasional improvements. It is, then, a short account of a rogue's life, offered by an author who chose to leave it much as it began. Read it for the voice of a narrator who describes his own misdeeds.
The Hidden Masterpiece — Honoré de Balzac
A short work by Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. It begins on a cold December morning in Paris, with a poorly dressed young man pacing outside a house in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. He hesitates like a lover afraid to approach, then crosses the threshold and asks whether Maître François Porbus is within. From that small, watchful opening the story concerns painting and painters. It is a good place to meet Balzac if you want the compression of a single episode rather than the sprawl of a full novel.
Gobseck — Honoré de Balzac
A second, separate Balzac piece, this one translated by Ellen Marriage, and dedicated by name to a former schoolfellow from the author's old school at Vendôme. The dedication is worth reading on its own: two boys who studied philosophy together, it says, when by rights they should have been minding their lessons, and who later met again in the career of letters. The story that follows takes its title from a character, Gobseck. Paired with The Hidden Masterpiece above, it lets you read two short Balzac works in different translators' hands and compare them.
Man and Wife — Wilkie Collins
This is the long one on the list — a full-length novel by the same author as A Rogue's Life. Its contents pages lay out its shape plainly: a prologue titled The Irish Marriage, then a story told in numbered scenes, each set somewhere named — a summer-house, an inn, London, a place called Windygates — and divided into many chapters. If the shorter works here leave you wanting a plot with room to develop, this is where to turn. It asks for more sittings, but the structure is signposted from the first page.
The Power of Concentration — William Walker Atkinson
The one book here that is not a story. It is a practical guide, and it states its premise at once: to accomplish anything you must concentrate your whole thought on the idea you are working out. It is candid about how hard this is — it grants that few people can hold a thought on a subject for long at first, and makes the odd, honest observation that it is easier to concentrate on something not good for us than on something beneficial. The remedy it proposes is a few short exercises each day. Reading it after six works of fiction is a deliberate change of gear: from watching invented people to being asked to do something yourself.
The books, free to read
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