There is something special about a book you can finish in a single sitting, one that stays with you long after the last page. The novella does that better than almost any other form of writing.
The entertainment publication Collider recently put together a ranking of the ten greatest novellas ever published. The list is a who’s who of the books many of us first encountered in school, and never quite forgot.
A few familiar titles made the cut. Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, published in 1982, earned a spot. So did Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea from 1952, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from 1937, and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which dates all the way back to 1915.
At the very top of the list sat George Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945. Collider describes it as a powerful and compact satire of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Orwell, who died in 1950 at the age of 46, packed an enormous amount of meaning into a very small book.
Readers on Goodreads agree. Animal Farm holds a rating of 4.03 out of 5 stars, based on more than 4.7 million reviews.
The book has also inspired decades of stage work. British actor Guy Masterson has been performing one-person productions based on Animal Farm for over 30 years. In a 2024 interview with the Maverick Theater, he called Orwell’s novella “truly remarkable.”
Masterson explained what he sees as the heart of the story. “In Animal Farm, it’s an allegory which is kind of strictly linked to the events of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s abuse of the ideals of communism,” he said. “He was effectively writing it to let the idealistic left know that what they believed in, i.e. communism as an ideal, was being abused.”
He also spoke to why the book refuses to feel dated. “For us living in a modern liberal democracy, it points out the hypocrisy of topical politicians and current politicians. And the lies that they tell and the speak and the alternative facts that they pump out all over the place,” Masterson continued.
Whether you read it decades ago or never got around to it, this one is worth pulling off the shelf again. It is short. It is sharp. And apparently, it is still the best of its kind.
