John Hawkes’ Travesty is a monologue by a guy about to drive his car into a brick wall at 140 kilometers an hour. The length of time the story takes is exactly equal to the length of time it would take to read the short novel out loud, which would probably only take a couple hours.
My pick is Replay by Ken Grimwood. For longest and shortest. It all happens in an instant, but it also covers 25 years, over and over again, each repetition getting just a little bit shorter.
The longest span of time covered by a book I’ve read is Edward Rutherford’s Sarum. It starts shortly before Britain is separated from the mainland of Europe and ends in the present day. I noticed one review in the web page I linked to said Rutherford was trying to do for England what Michener did for Hawai’i and Texas.
A remember a book by J J Jadway that covers only seven minutes of time. Can’t remember the title though.
The bible covers from the start of the universe to the end of days.
I’ve read Evolution, by Stephen Baxter, which goes from 65 million years ago to 500 million years into the future.
Yeah, but it only takes 6000 years to do it in. Michener’s got it beat by a country mile halfway down the second page.
A great, great book. I highly recommend it.
What about the short story about that guy who’s hanged during the Civil War and keeps having the lyrics from Duran Duran’s “Rio” go through his head just before he dies, a heartbeat later?
Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 ‘First and last men’ covers 18 human species from the present for about 2,000,000,000 years into the future but Stephen Baxter has outdone him with ‘Evolution’ and ‘The Light of other Days’.
‘Evolution’ is what it says. I can’t quite remember how far back it starts but somewhere with dinosaurs and consists of individual stories at various stages with a catastrophe just past mid-way that destroys human civilisation and sets the human species on diverging devolutionary paths until the Earth becomes too parched for life, via a period dominated by intelligent rat descendents. I think Wikipedia is wrong on key points like moving to another planet but maybe I just missed that.
His earlier ‘Light of Other Days’ is really two stories. Set in the near future, it involves developing a device capable of reading and displaying the past from effects on neutrinoes. (Wikipedia says gamma rays but I don’t think so). One story is the question that Isaac Asimov addressed in a short story, when does the past begin? (Baxter has probably read it). Privacy becomes impossible and an underground culture develops around shielding cloaks.
The second aspect comes from a way of tying the past viewer to mitochondrial DNA and being able to see through the eyes (literally) of maternal ancestors. This goes back through the whole of known evolution until it hits millions of years of ‘Snowball Earth’ following asteroid collision. When light appears again before the collision, it hits unknown evolution with all known life descended from a sample put into safe storage by intelligent centipede-like creatures under a green sky to survive the collision.
About 1,100 years IIRC. However, since there’s a definite, lone protagonist who experiences it as just a few subjective years, it doesn’t seem right to me to include it, for some reason.
Ironically, though, I have to cheat a bit for my answer. I just reread the original Foundation trilogy. Technically three books, but I’ve got them here in one hardcover edition, so I’m calling it one big book. Anyway, it takes place over 300-400 years.
Don’t have a good answer for shortest.
Elendil’s Heir writes:
> What about the short story about that guy who’s hanged during the Civil War
> and keeps having the lyrics from Duran Duran’s “Rio” go through his head just
> before he dies, a heartbeat later?
I don’t know, but I think I read it once. In 1960. It took me about twenty minutes to read.
Jerseyman writes:
> Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 ‘First and last men’ covers 18 human species from the
> present for about 2,000,000,000 years into the future but Stephen Baxter has
> outdone him with ‘Evolution’ and ‘The Light of other Days’.
I can’t see how the Baxter novels are supposed to be over a longer period than First and Last Men, but in any case, as I wrote in post #6, Star Maker takes place over a much longer period, since they last over the history of several universes.
Perhaps not as long as Star Maker then, but I’ve just started on Spin by Robert Charles Wilson; 500 million years so far, and I’m only 1/8th of the way through the book. 
Resurrecting a zombie (sorry) to add that this is Lester del Rey’s 1951 short story “…And It Comes Out Here” available at Project Gutenberg ...And It Comes Out Here by Lester Del Rey | Project Gutenberg
A couple of honorable mentions:
Marrow by Robert Reed, where the main part of the story takes place over 5,000 years and involves the same essentially immortal characters.
Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward, where the main part of the story takes place over 1 month, but for one of the two species featured that equals over 1,000 full lifetimes.
The first book that comes to my mind is Cloud Atlas. I don’t remember the exact time period, I guess about 500 years or so. And it covers that without time or space travel while connecting all the characters one way or another.
Longest, probably Look Homeward, Angel and East of Eden. Both cover the period from the American Civil War to World War I.
Taken as one work, ***I, Claudius ***and Claudius the God, a “history” of the early Roman Empire, from Augustus to Nero.
The shortest, probably Going after Cacciato:
In the story, GIs hike from Vietnam to Paris, but it’s revealed at the end to be nothing more than a night’s fantasizing while on guard duty.
Does the Torah count?
It starts at the big bang, and goes on to modern humans, so about in excess of 4 billion years
Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe covers a period of time from near present-day to 576,000,000,000 years in the future, where (when) the restaurant at the Universe’s “End” is located. While the main characters travel there via time warp, Marvin the Paranoid Android is forced to wait for them in real time.
“After that I went into a bit of a decline…”
I know it’s a zombie, but I like the premise of the thread so I want to participate anyways.
Longest time period that I remember reading is Middlesex. This covers the lives of three generations of family (the main character, her parents, and her grandparents) from childhood through adulthood, so over a hundred years. And imho, the book is worse for it, because the book takes a good story and throws in so much detail and backstory that it ruins the actual story.
Shortest time period I remember reading is a Stephen King novel where a man dies while having sex with his wife, who is handcuffed to a bed, and the story takes place during the time in which she is handcuffed to the bed, so maybe two days time. Gerald’s Game, that’s the name of it. And again, I think the short time frame didn’t work too well for the book, because to make it work as a novel, King had to stretch some brief moments into pages worth of text. It was a good premise that I think would have worked better as a novella or short story.
It doesn’t start at the Big Bang. At least, the creation it describes is in no way comparable to the Big Bang. And internal evidence implies that it covers a time period of a few thousand years at most.