Bukowski once said “the less I say, the better I feel.” And it’s true, sometimes we don’t need to say much. Sometimes three small words can make a big story, and sometimes three words is all we can carry with us. Maybe you’re traveling and you can’t carry much, or maybe you’re sick of reading long books. While long novels definitely have their thing, there’s something special about the smallness of a story. Below you’ll find 9 small books, small enough you can tuck in the back of your pants, but large enough to keep you coming back over and over again.
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
Pages: 88
Publishing date: 1947
Plot in one sentence: The unsentimental account of how a wife shoots her husband.
Relevant Quotes:
He said he was like a cork bobbing on the surface of the sea, pleasantly cradled by the waves but unable to know what there was at the bottom.
I went up to my room, got into bed, and cried. It was the first time in my life that I had cried over a man, and it seemed to me this must be a sign that I loved him. I thought how, if he asked me to marry him, I would say yes, and then we would always be together and even when he was out I would know where he was. But when I imagined our making love together I felt something like disgust and said to myself that I couldn’t be in love with him after all. It was all very confusing.
My mother cried and said that marriage was a lottery, but he told her that she was very silly and that women always have some excuse for shedding a few tears.
Writer commentary: “I write about families because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” – Natalia Ginzburg
The Fall by Albert Camus
Pages: 147
Publishing date: 1957
Plot in one sentence: A judge-penitent confesses his story of success and his “fall” from society to a stranger while exploring Amsterdam
Relevant Quotes:
“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”
Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur
Pages: 113
Publishing date: 1989
Plot in one sentence: The interwoven stories of five women in the outskirts of Tehran inspired by Islamic mysticism and Iranian history.
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
Pages: 97
Publishing date: 1924
Plot in one sentence: Hemingway's first published book was this collection of short stories about Nick Adams, Hemingway's alter ego, named after the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord".
Relevant Quotes:
“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”
“Remember that he who conquers himself is greater than the one who conquers a city.”
“‘Is dying hard, Daddy?’‘ "No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends." They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Pages: 92
Publishing date: 1943
Plot in one sentence: A young prince visits several planets before landing on Earth where he makes observations about life, death, love, friendship, loneliness, and human nature.
Relevant Quotes:
“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
“You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one could die for you.”
On Booze by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pages: 86
Publishing date: 2011
Plot in one sentence: “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
Relevant Quotes:
"...and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream — but one is continually startled out of this by various contacrs with the world."
"Of course all life is a process ofbreaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work— the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside— the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once."
"But I had been thanking the gods too long, and thanking them for nothing."
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Pages: 175
Publishing date: 1948
Plot in one sentence: A lowly geisha meets a wealthy man at a mountaintop hot springs.
Relevant Quotes:
“After all, only women are able really to love.”
“Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.”
“He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.”
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Pages: 160
Publishing date: 1988
Plot in one sentence: A young Japanese woman muses about food and love amongst a background of tragedy.
Relevant Quotes:
“People aren't overcome by situations or outside forces. Defeat comes from within.”
“In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.”
“It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.”
Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin
Pages: 90
Publishing date: 1957
Plot in one sentence: A black algebra teacher in 1950s reacts to his brother Sonny's drug addiction, arrest, and recovery.
Relevant Quotes:
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”
“I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”
“All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness,”
