The Historian has lots of dialogue when speaking to the reptilian scientists about the filmstrip.
“He Done Her Wrong” by Milt Gross. It’s a novel (of sorts).
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but Jerusalem’s Lot, the short story by Stephen King, consists of letters written to a friend, with the dialogue being merely written, as in relayed to someone.
I don’t remember Watership Down or Jonathan Livingston Seagull well enough to remember if they contain dialogue as such.
There was a Conan short story–“Red Sails” or “Red Sun” or something in the “Red” line–with little or no dialogue, at least in the comics adaptation. Artists used to hate it when Roy Thomas would just send them a Xerox of a few pages from the old Robert E. Howard novels instead of a written plot breakdown, and I strongly suspect this story was an instance of this happening.
Another short story, dimly remembered: Jack London describing an arctic winter where the prospector endangered his life by getting his feet wet.
You mean “To Build a Fire”? I haven’t read it since elementary school, but the wiki summary says there are other characters who warned our firestarter at the beginning of the story.
Looks very interesting, I’ll look that one up for me to enjoy.
Thanks again everyone. I’ll make a list of these for the writing group as there’s now more than I’ll get through over the holidays (three weeks, from 12/16 - Yay!)
Please carry on, even if these do contain speech, it’s good to have new suggestions.
I have both Watership Down and JLS, Krokodil, and they’re very chatty for beasties without vocal cords!
While Doris Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments does - eventually - have dialog, it takes her about 90 pages to get to that stage, and the whole book is written very much like a sociological report. So that might be another interesting one for your group.
Raptor Red by Robert Bakker.
Yep, that’s the one.
I was going to suggest Day of the Jackal, but thinking about it there must have been some dialogue at the beginning, when the cop character was roughing up some witnesses.
If there is dialogue in Last and First Men, it’s probably in the opening segment, when the frame story (this book is a history of the future that is being telepathically transmitted back in time by the Nth (I forget what N was) Men) is established.
Was there any actual dialogue in Up the Down Staircase? As I recall, and the Wikipedia article confirms, the whole novel is made up of written objects such as memos, notes, essays, lesson plans, letters, etc.
Some of the letters do recall dialogue.
King is a master at writing stories about a single person all alone–Misery, Gerard’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Running Man, Blaze, and especially Survivor Type, which has very little dialogue.
It’s a short story, not a novel, but Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum has no direct dialogue, and only a tiny bit of implied dialogue.
Thanks, will add that one to the list.
Really liked the line: I saw them fashion the syllables of my name, and I shuddered, because no sound succeeded.
Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith is told completely thru letters written by a single character. I can’t remember if she quotes anyone in the letters.
One impressive thing was the way the writing improves from the first letters by an eight-year-old to the final ones by a grandmother.
Jerzy Kosinkski’s The Painted Bird is often said to contain no dialogue. It’s surely 99% dialogue free, but I seem to remember the last line in the book actually being dialogue.