The majority of literature courses at the high-school level (and college, for that matter) are one semester in length, which makes it difficult to teach a novel. When curricula calls for the instructor to cover a certain number of authors and/or literary movements in a given course, devoting several weeks to one book is often impractical, if not impossible. Furthermore, the reluctancy of young readers to tackle a whole novel makes including one even more of a challenge. Yet the occasional longer work, something in between the short story and short novel, can be worthwhile for both teacher and student. Often, these in-between texts offer the concentrated plot line of the story coupled with increased character development and use of imagery/symbolism. These length fictions frequently have what novelist and scholar John Gardner called "an almost oriental purity. . . [an] elegant tracing of an emotional line" (183). There are several excellent pieces of writing which fall into this literary no-man's land -- some well-known, others not -- but finding them is often made difficult by book publishers who masquerade these briefer works as full-blown novels.
