There’s nothing I love more in the depths of winter than a hefty novel that will last me through the long, cold nights. But as spring fitfully creeps in, I find myself craving something lighter — brisk, bingeable and easily portable on a park stroll. These novels, novellas and story collections are all under 200 pages and can reasonably be read front-to-back in a single sitting (though no pressure to speed through!). Their brevity is like a literary aperitif, cleansing the palate for brighter days ahead.
Foster
by Claire Keegan
Keegan is best known for “Small Things Like These,” her slim, sneakily moving novel about an Irish coal merchant facing a moral dilemma over the Christmas holidays in 1985. “Foster” is also set in Ireland in the ’80s, and is just as potent.
The book follows an adolescent girl whose parents deposit her for the summer at her aunt and uncle’s farmhouse, where she finds a brief, life-sustaining moment of familial tenderness. Keegan has a rare gift for rendering emotion without sentimentality and, in just 128 pages, “Foster” delivers an unexpected battering — particularly in its final, perfect sentence, which hinges on a heartbreaking double entendre. Read our review.
Perfection
by Vincenzo Latronico; translated by Sophie Hughes
A merciless satire of gentrification, Latronico’s chronicle of the European expat set is a mordant study in self-loathing. Tom and Anna — fashionable, well-meaning graphic designers with a tastefully appointed apartment in Berlin — watch in consternation as their adopted city slowly transforms around them, a symptom of the unfettered globalization in which they have been enthusiastic, if unwitting, participants.
Latronico observes his protagonists as if under a microscope; if you’ve ever lived abroad, let alone bought a Berber rug or an Angelpoise lamp, you might feel scrutinized, too. Read our review.
The Young Man
by Annie Ernaux; translated by Alison L. Strayer
The Nobel laureate Ernaux is renowned for her bracingly candid blend of fiction and memoir, which the critic Edmund White called “collective autobiography.” In her most recent book, “The Young Man,” she relates the story of how, at the age of 54, she began a fervid and tumultuous affair with a student three decades her junior — an experience that she renders not as transgressive but as liberating, if also painful. Ernaux’s candor is frequently astonishing, and hard to shake.
Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig; translated by Joel Rotenberg
Zweig’s 104-page masterpiece, completed days before his death by suicide in 1942, is a complex look at the aftermath of the Nazi regime and the sometimes strange and unexpected reverberations of the Holocaust. On an ocean liner somewhere in the Atlantic, a chess grandmaster begins a game with B., a former attorney who proves a surprisingly capable adversary — despite having never played a game of chess in his life.
Convenience Store Woman
by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
The first of Murata’s novels to be translated into English, the beguiling, delightfully oddball “Convenience Store Woman” was a hit in her native Japan before going on to international acclaim. It tells the story of Keiko Furukura, who has worked at a 24-hour shop in the middle of Tokyo for nearly two decades.
For Keiko, working at her store is a totalizing experience; she expresses no other needs, interests or ambitions. Murata, in adopting her point of view, makes conventional people — not Keiko — seem like the weirdos, defamiliarizing the modern world with acerbic vision. Read our review.
Concrete Island
by J.G. Ballard
“Concrete Island” has a simple premise: After a car accident, a man is stranded on the median between intersecting highways. But this being Ballard — the author of such cult classics as “Crash,” “High-Rise” and “The Atrocity Exhibition” — things soon grow stranger and more complicated.
Cut off from the world, unable to leave his quasi-dystopian “island,” the man meets other strandees and struggles to survive among them. Through Ballard’s fun house mirror lens, the median takes on the scale and dimensions of an entire alternate reality — like an urban twist on “Lord of the Flies.” Read our review.
Last Night
by James Salter
The author of the novels “A Sport and a Pastime” and “Light Years” was also a master of the short story, and he was never better than in “Last Night,” a collection of 10 crisply laconic tales dealing with themes of dissatisfaction, betrayal and desire. The title story concerns a thwarted attempt at assisted suicide and the surges of messy passion it kicks up. Others, like the brutal and incisive imploding-relationship drama “Comet,” showcase the exacting prose style that made Salter the ultimate writer’s writer. Read our review.
Room Temperature
by Nicholson Baker
Baker’s first novel, “The Mezzanine,” takes place over the course of one man’s lunch hour; its successor is even more concise, spanning just 20 minutes as a young father feeds his newborn in a rocking chair. Baker’s bottomless curiosity about the world gives the novel its depth: As his narrator idly reflects on a smorgasbord of mundane minutiae — model airplane kits, colorful dry-cleaning tags — he taps into something larger and more profound. (The book is also, as Eric Magnuson recently noted in The Atlantic, a rare positive literary depiction of a stay-at-home dad.)
Big Fan
by Alexandra Romanoff
Millennial boy bands, hot-and-heavy hookups, universal basic income: “Big Fan,” a blithe novella from the indie romance publisher 831 Stories, boasts a pretty unusual constellation of primary interests. But this combination of highbrow and low is surprisingly effective. It helps that the book’s author — who co-hosts the pop music and sports podcast “On the Bleachers” and has also written young adult novels under the name Zan Romanoff — has such a brisk and lively style, turning the will-they-won’t-they tension between a disgraced political strategist and the semiretired pop star she idolized as a teenager into a kind of elevated fan fiction.
Desperate Characters
by Paula Fox
A stray cat bites the hand of a New York socialite: So begins Fox’s fraught, ferocious novel of social anxiety and urban malaise. Set over the course of one weekend in the aftermath of the bite, the book follows Sophie Bentwood, a translator living with her husband in a Brooklyn townhouse, as she frets over whether or not she might have rabies. This tightly plotted domestic drama is a master class in mundane tension. “God, if I am rabid,” Sophie reflects to herself in a moment of late-night dread (and slanted relief), “I am equal to what is outside.” Fox makes you feel the white heat of that rabidity.
The post 10 Short Books for Spring appeared first on New York Times.
