You may have noticed them at the register of your local bookseller — very small, handsome paperback books of irregular trim, with plain covers in bold colors. Often stopping short at a breezy 150 pages, they make a point of being concise, and are meant to be dispatched in one or two sittings. As soon as you have finished beginning, you begin ending.
This short-book renaissance comes at the height of our Age of the Essay. Everyone is reading them, and even more people are writing them. The books’ modesty of scale appears like a rebellion against importance, but they are insistent, even a little pedantic — self-conscious intellectual sallies that bring a dignified brevity to nonfiction. They take themselves seriously, much like a very short man. Their titles announce a quarry, or query: “Men Explain Things to Me” (Rebecca Solnit), “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism” (Kristin Dombek), “The Hatred of Poetry” (Ben Lerner), “Little Labors” (Rivka Galchen), “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters” (Dan Fox), “Nicotine” (Gregor Hens), “The Art of Death” (Edwidge Danticat). Those steroidal Goliaths of nonfiction, magazine articles bloated to hardcover size that stalk the catalogs of the major presses — who reads them? The very short book topples them with a single stone.
True to its essence, the very short book does not pretend to have more to say than it does. This is as charming as encountering the rare person who knows when to speak and when to be silent. As a form, the very short book is far preferable to the “essay collection,” whereby a writer’s previously published output is lazily sutured together into a Frankenstein’s monster that promises but rarely delivers more than its parts. Still, there are short books that could try a little harder. Only once has an idea from a very short book really caught fire — Solnit’s notion of “mansplaining.” Most of them aspire less to cultural diagnosis than to self-help; reading one can be a little like having a talk with an intelligent friend urging you to be your best self. Some, like “Little Labors” or “Nicotine,” combine elements of memoir with the insouciance of thinking out loud. Others, like “The Hatred of Poetry” and “The Selfishness of Others,” advance something as old-fashioned as an argument.
They quote philosophy and theory, presenting themselves as a kind of cheat sheet: We do the homework so you don’t have to. They are not, like Oxford’s Very Short Introductions, primers on useful topics such as human anatomy, banking or Rastafari. Nor are they, like the Penguin Great Ideas series, abbreviated snippets from the canon — pieces of the infinite night sky chopped up and glimpsed through the bound aperture of a telescope. They come already compressed, born rather than cut short. You will learn something, for sure, but not more than you can handle.
Ours is a busy world, and there are many television programs to watch. Very short books are an easy way to increase the total number of books you have read — a worthy goal in itself. Plus, photographs of short books, either on their own or in a stack, can be posted to one’s social media account to communicate taste and substance. Since short books are short, the odds are greater that the poster will actually read the books she advertises herself by. In this way, very short books contribute to a greater harmony, whereby people are more like the people they pretend to be.
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