50 Best Books - Novellas, Short Stories & Plays

In this third instalment charting his 50 best books, the Principal identifies the finest shorter texts, including novellas, short stories and plays. 

Metamorphosis and Other Stories Franz Kafka (tr. Michael Hoffman) 1915

Never mind if it’s a cockroach or a beetle or an unnamed insect, the opening tale when a man is transformed into a sordid creature is a deadpan comic masterpiece, terrifyingly developed. Elsewhere things are endlessly deferred – appointments with the law, doors leading to more doors down interminable corridors. Kafka is a one-note author but what a brilliant and defining note it is.   

Civilisation and its Discontents Sigmund Freud (tr. James Strachey) 1930

Perhaps the most profound book I have ever read. It was here I learnt that the normative condition of human life is mild unhappiness; that religion is an oceanic feeling, its reasoning vaporous but appealing; that humans are naturally aggressive – the surprise being that there are so few wars, not that there are so many. Civilisation is a fragile thing, Freud is saying. Three years later the Nazis assumed power.  

The Outsider Albert Camus (tr. Joseph Laredo) 1942

Based in Algeria, but written from his experience of the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France, Camus dramatises the life of a man who feels his existence is meaningless. He commits an accidental murder and can’t be bothered to fight the institutions that might afford him justice. In the end, we see how easily an individual, even a whole society, can become alienated, and we need to care about that. 

Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953

Written originally in French, the play is as austere an experience as you could ever wish for. A stage with just one tree, two men in bowler hats darkly and comically waiting for someone. Lucky’s monologue is the most brilliant moment in a drama in little or nothing happens, and yet everything does, for all we have is language between us and the abyss. 

Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Andrew Hurley) 1962

If you like your stories short and dry, Borges is your man. Unforgivingly erudite, but relentlessly playful, you will find here the man who writes out Don Quixote word for word as a new novel; the man who can remember absolutely everything; the making of a map on a scale of 1:1. My favourite story is The Garden of Forking Paths. Like Kafka, Borges is a writer with a narrow but range, but a unique and unerring focus.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee 1962

Without doubt this is my favourite modern play. I remember seeing the movie, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the leads and being completely knocked out by it. Even when you know the shock of the ending, the power-play and game of wits serves both to anatomise the characters and the society they inhabit. Coruscating, exhausting, fuelled by alcohol, resentment and love, this is a must-see (and read).

Marcovaldo Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver) 1963

Don’t be misled by the lightness and speed of these stories, or the haplessness of the hero – these are delightful tales, organized around the seasons, interrogating the gap between nature and culture, and using the protagonist to represent the bizarre quality of modern life, from a department store Santa, to a flight taken by accident, to the missing letters in a neon sign, while lovers coo behind them.

Too Loud a Solitude Bohumil Hrabal (tr. Michael Heim) 1976

The novella proceeds like a fugue, repeating certain lines as the themes build, at first lightly then devastatingly. A man pulps books but reads them before he destroys them on behalf of the regime. The books include volumes by Nietzsche and Kant. The hero is haunted by the love of a gypsy woman sent to her death by the Nazis. A novella of perfect scale. Achingly beautiful in its rhythms and details. 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Christopher Hampton 1985

Adapted from Laclos’s 1782 epistolary novel, Hampton dramatises how a wager over a seduction has appalling consequences for both perpetrator and victim. The play is marvellously choreographed, the dialogue witty and tender by turns. In the background – absent from the film version – is the looming threat of the revolution and the guillotine, poised to descend from history on these gallivanting aristocrats.   

Early Stories and Late Stories John Updike 1976-2008

The couple of hundred stories collected here chronicle mid-century America with a cherishing regard for its time and people. Concerns for the local modulate into the universal in tales of love, marriage, family, infidelity, and death. What transforms the mundane material into something special is the quality of the writing. No one writes a better sentence than Updike. I collect them like butterflies.  

If I had to choose only one of the above it would be the Updike stories.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO