5 Books That Blur the Line between the Novel and the Short Story

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
The 2011 Pulitzer winner for fiction is perhaps the most perfect example of this kind of hybrid. Read it in one sitting and it’s a novel, telling the tale of a group of people linked by music and the modern music industry. It’s a novel peppered with creative and exhilarating postmodern touches that shouldn’t work as well as they do as the story jumps back and forth through time—time and its function as the “stealth goon” that truly takes everything from you being the bitter center of the story—but recognizably a novel. Read it one story at a time, however, and you walk away totally satisfied with each piece, with no sense that you’re missing the larger picture. How exactly Egan managed to pull this off is both obvious and mysterious: the tricks of the trade are easy to identify, but the specific recipe she used is difficult to articulate, which is generally the case for all the best art.

Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk, as always, doesn’t approach anything straightforwardly. The story of desperate (and, naturally, weird) aspiring authors who lock themselves into an old theater for the ultimate writer’s retreat is a double-subversion of a book: both a short novel punctuated by short stories that at first glance are independent of each other, and a larger narrative of increasingly insane writers. Dig deeper, however, and the stories refer back to the overall themes of the novel and provide much of the backstory normally handled in exposition in more traditional forms. In the end, if you separated the stories from the larger narrative they would both lose much of their power, which is your main clue that this is a hybrid book that’s more than the sum of its parts.

Dubliners, by James Joyce
James Joyce’s classic is often referred to as a short story cycle instead of a novel, because it lacks any sense of the narrative cohesion normally required for novels: the characters do not interact or link up aside from their shared city and culture. What makes Dubliners a novel is, rather, the heavily defined theme of time and age: the stories are arranged so that they concern themselves with children at first, then young adults and students, then mature adults, and finally old folks and, eventually, death itself. The work is clearly conceived as a whole and while the stories can be enjoyed individually—and largely lack the linguistic heroics of Joyce’s other works, relying instead on lyrically straightforward prose—it’s much more powerful when taken together as a sort of universal experience we all share.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
The most formally structured of these examples, Mitchell’s novel is clearly designed to be read not only as a whole, but in the specific order he has chosen. Still, divided as they are by the book’s structure, the sections amount to separate short stories related by theme, and by characters in a sense, as they are reincarnated in different situations and time periods without any memory of their prior existence. Once again, if you pull the stories out and read them separately, they’re enjoyable on their own—but it’s the format and structure Mitchell has chosen that bring out their most powerful ideas, making this as much a novel as a collection of stories.

Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King
Sharing characters and overt themes of generational failure, loss, and the choices we make in our lives, King’s fantastic book is two novellas and three short stories, but these can be viewed as long, ruminative chapters telling different aspects of a single story. Centering on the Vietnam War era and King’s clear feeling that the “baby boomer” generation squandered their potential to change the world and make things better, Hearts in Atlantis also very clearly ties into King’s Dark Tower universe (which is slowly becoming the universe every single King book exists in, in some way), but in ways only fans of those books would likely recognize.