Let’s go older–The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night.
Thank you!
W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Ashenden: The British Agent effectively consists of short stories that stand alone from one another.
The Grand Inquisitor is often published and read on its own outside the Brothers Karamazov.
Yeah, Barth. My fingers have a mind of their own these days. :smack:
The Tale of the Adopted Daughter is certainly a stand alone story, with a little bit of Lazarus Long.
My first thought was Arthur C. Clarke’s “Tales From The White Hart.”
However, I see that most of the chapters had actually been previously published as stand-alone short stories, then collected into this book with a framing device. So this may not be the kind of thing the OP is looking for.
It’s a fun book nonetheless.
There are plenty of novels that are “built up” of short stories (especially in science fiction, for some reason). Very early in his career, Alfred E. van Vogt called this process a “fix up”. the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction adopted this as standard terminology - there are lots of “fix ups” out there. Many of the ones listed above are “fix ups”, with very little attempt to smooth over the connections (The Illustrated Ma, Tales from the White Hart). Raymond F. Jones’ novel This Island Earth, which was later pretty badly adapted into the movie of the same name) was a fix-up, the first portion of which, The Alien Machine, appeared as a standalone short story in 1949. (It’s one of the few bits that was translated almost properly to the film. But they still managed to screw it up – the Metalunans didn’t provide a schematiic for the Interociter. the whole point of the test was Meacham’s ability to dope it all out from clues given in the catalog. Otherwise it’s not much of an aptitude test.)
Code of the Lifemaker. The prologue chapter is the story of a damaged replicating probe that landed on Titan in pre-history and eventually through a series of events evolved into an entire mechanical ecosystem. It can and has been published as a stand-alone story.
I know that is a typo, but I would read that. “Ma, why’ve you got so many tattoos? Billy’s Ma ain’t got tattoos. Tommy’s Ma ain’t got tattoos. It’s embarrassing.”
It’s the best part of the novel (there’s a bit of good stuff in the later part, but the opening is terrific).
Niven and Pournelle cut the first chapter of The Mote In God’s Eye for length and later published it as a short story.
Probably every chapter of every James Herriot book could stand alone.
Two that I thought of right out of the box:
- The chapter “Death, New York Style” from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
- The ending to Stephen King’s Under the Dome, which is so out of place with the rest of the book it read like King, realizing he was 400+ pages in and nowhere near closing the book, decided to just blow it all up.
There are a bunch of stand-alone chapters in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. They are stories told by characters in the novel, but maybe that counts, because the plot of The Pickwick Papers is episodic.
Regards,
Shodan
You’re speaking of The Pension Grillparzer and if it was one chapter it would win the thread. It was included in the book to show Garp’s progression as an author. In the novel, he sent it in to a publisher who rejected it quite harshly. Irving actually submitted the story for publication while writing Garp and he included the actual rejection letter he received IRL when he submitted it. As I recall the publisher stated it was “mildly interesting”.
IRL the story was great though and won that years Pushcart prize for short fiction and it has since been published including on audible. It really was a great novella and amusing to think in this case art imitated life for a change. It also pointed out what authors deal with when they submit their works to publishers who don’t get the art they’re evaluating. Not groundbreaking stuff but perfect in a book about a novelist.
The chapter “Christmas” from To Kill a Mockingbird works well as a stand-alone short story.
Just the story I was thinking of - brilliant is almost an understatement.
Any of the historical recollections scattered throughout The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, but especially the incident set in Mongolia.
I just read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer again. Several of the chapters are a short stories. For example, the chapter about painting the fence.