Novel-in-stories

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escritora

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Can someone offer an explanation for novel-in-stories?

Also, can anyone recommend novel-in-stories books? I read classic, mainstream, and contemporary stories (no genre) published by commercial or independent publishers.

(Independent publishers whose books can be found in libraries and bookstores.)

Thanks in advance!
 

Layla Nahar

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Maybe it's like "Women of Sand and Myrrh" - I forget the writer's name, but it's four stories about individual women, but it all adds up to one big story.
 

Ari Meermans

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A novel-within-a-novel is when the narrative is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the characters. It's an interesting technique, but one not easily pulled off, I'd think. The "novel" excerpts have to further the main story's plot and intertwine with or provide the main story's subtext.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood is a novel-within-a-novel.

ETA: Just want to add that The Blind Assassin required my complete focus and it took a while for me to get into "the zone". In short, it's a demanding read.
 
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Anna Iguana

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My understanding is that a novel in stories is a collection of linked short stories. Usually the stories share characters. The only novel in stories I've read is The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor.
 

Ari Meermans

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Oh, I see. Maybe that is what escritora is referring to. Thing is, while characters and place are unifying factors in linked short story collections, you can't call those linked stories a novel. They don't have the flow of a novel—they each pursue their own individual story lines.
 

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My understanding is that a novel in stories is a collection of linked short stories. Usually the stories share characters. The only novel in stories I've read is The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor.

Do you mean something like Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Ohio? (Ray Bradbury cited it as an inspiration for his Martian Chronicles, which is also a series of short stories that tell an overall arc involving humanity's expansion to Mars, if not centered around the same characters.)
 

Anna Iguana

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Oh, I see. Maybe that is what escritora is referring to. Thing is, while characters and place are unifying factors in linked short story collections, you can't call those linked stories a novel. They don't have the flow of a novel—they each pursue their own individual story lines.

I tend to agree with you, Ari, but I've run across the term a few times. Attaching the word "novel" to a short story collection seems like a marketing move, since novels sell more easily than story collections.

Olive Kitteridge is an oft-cited, more recent example.
 

Anna Iguana

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Do you mean something like Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Ohio? (Ray Bradbury cited it as an inspiration for his Martian Chronicles, which is also a series of short stories that tell an overall arc involving humanity's expansion to Mars, if not centered around the same characters.)

I think both of those would qualify, but my impression is that they predate the phrase "novel in stories," so I've personally never heard them described as such.
 

Ari Meermans

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I tend to agree with you, Ari, but I've run across the term a few times. Attaching the word "novel" to a short story collection seems like a marketing move, since novels sell more easily than story collections.

Olive Kitteridge is an oft-cited, more recent example.

gah! I hate trends like that. Words matter, they have meaning. Words are how we communicate effectively with each other.

And, you know what? This is not an industry where people can afford to play fast-and-loose with words. By golly, words are the writer's primary tools after all. Just :gaah
 

AW Admin

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Boccacio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are not novels; links short stories are not novels.

A Thousand and One Arabian Nights is not a novel.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is not a novel.

A novel is a novel:

1. A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
2. The literary genre represented by novels.
 

Siri Kirpal

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Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Well, then, there's The Joy Luck Club, which Amy Tan wrote as a series of linked short stories. But it was marketed as a novel and reads like a novel, because there is an arc which starts and the beginning and ends at the end.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

Ari Meermans

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Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Well, then, there's The Joy Luck Club, which Amy Tan wrote as a series of linked short stories. But it was marketed as a novel and reads like a novel, because there is an arc which starts and the beginning and ends at the end.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

The Joy Luck Club is a novel by virtue of the arc you describe. It's not a series of linked short stories; it comprises interlocking stories by and about mothers and daughters—each in her own voice. Amy Tan calls it a story, and it is:

I could now see what there had been in the flawed 13-page story, with its dozen beginnings and voices. I wrote a new story, this one called "The Joy Luck Club", about a woman whose mother has just died and who regrets that she never knew who she truly was.
 

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Linked short stories = Decameron and Canterbury Tales and Tales of the City.

Prose work of fiction with a narrative arc = a governing structure = novel

Richardson's Clarissa is a series of letters. It's considered an epistolary novel because those letters create a coherent narrative structure.

The Joy Luck Club absolutely is a novel, as Siri Kirpal and Ari note.
 
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escritora

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Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Will spend my weekend at the library to get more acquainted with the recommendations.
 

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I've never heard the term Novel-in-story before, so this was enlightening. Thanks all of you for filling me in. I now feel I can start inching out of the corner and possibly take off the cap that says "dunce".
 

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Have a look at Julianne Pachico's The Lucky Ones. It's marketed as a novel in some countries and as a collection of short stories in others. I'm not quite sure which category it truly belongs to. Characters appear and disappear and narrative arcs are abruptly terminated midway, which made me feel that I was reading short stories. Yet The Lucky Ones is set in Colombia at the height of the drug wars, when forced disappearances were rife and not knowing what had happened to the missing was a standard part of daily life, and once I had grasped the context, I realised that the sense of loss and disorientation and not-knowing is itself the conclusion of the narrative arc. With that in mind, it can be read as a novel about interrupted lives and questions that are never answered. I think the way it muddies the two genres is quite clever.
 

escritora

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Have a look at Julianne Pachico's The Lucky Ones. It's marketed as a novel in some countries and as a collection of short stories in others. I'm not quite sure which category it truly belongs to. Characters appear and disappear and narrative arcs are abruptly terminated midway, which made me feel that I was reading short stories. Yet The Lucky Ones is set in Colombia at the height of the drug wars, when forced disappearances were rife and not knowing what had happened to the missing was a standard part of daily life, and once I had grasped the context, I realised that the sense of loss and disorientation and not-knowing is itself the conclusion of the narrative arc. With that in mind, it can be read as a novel about interrupted lives and questions that are never answered. I think the way it muddies the two genres is quite clever.

This sounds really good! I'll give it a read. Just borrowed the e-book from the library.
 

Marlys

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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith comes to mind. It was marketed as a novel, but when I picked it up and started reading it, it read like a series of short stories. I'm not sure if it later became more cohesive, because I put it right back down. I love short stories, but that's not what I was expecting.
 

Ellis Clover

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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith comes to mind. It was marketed as a novel, but when I picked it up and started reading it, it read like a series of short stories. I'm not sure if it later became more cohesive, because I put it right back down. I love short stories, but that's not what I was expecting.

They're pretty traditional novels. It's a while since I read the first one though, I'll have to go back and check it out.

A Visit From the Goon Squad would quality as a novel-in-stories, I think. (Good lord, how I love that book.) Olive Kitteridge's chapters are self-contained stories that serve the narrative arc in a similar way, so I'm happy to call it a novel rather than a sneakily marketed short story collection.
 
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