Call Me Fish-Owl: Reflecting on the Novellas Neither Fish Nor Fowl Status

There's a lengthy discussion on John Madera's blog about the novella and its place in the pantheon of literary endeavors, including a wide-ranging novella reading list.

From the story...

After reading Eugene Marten’s novella Waste, struck by its concentrated unity, its razor-sharp timing, its immediacy, etc., the way it zipped along like a guilty-pleasure page-turner but with Gordon Lish-approved sentences, penetrating insight, and an underlying critique of consumption and waste, I wondered which works of comparable length had a similar effect on me and why? What immediately came to mind were books that I’d read as a teenager like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Billy Budd, The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fahrenheit 451, Heart of Darkness, The War of the Worlds, etc. While these are all arguably significant works, I wondered why, in contrast to novels, had my reading of novellas since then been so meager. This led to thoughts about how a novella is, or even whether it should be, defined. Is a novella simply a work of prose having a certain amount of words, a fiction that’s longer than a long story, or a novellette, but shorter than a novel? Or are word and page counts really just arbitrary considerations in determining how to define a work? Is this kind of categorization simply shaped by marketing forces? Is it even worthwhile to ask these questions?