The novella is the orphan of contemporary fiction. Too lengthy for modern magazines and too short for penny-pinching publishers, this middle-distance literary form rarely gets hardbound as a single offering. Now the Pulitzer-prizewinning author Richard Ford has published three novellas in one volume.
Two of the long stories in Women with Men (Knopf; 255 pages; $23) are related by place and similar characters: a pair of befuddled middle-aged Americans in Paris. Both Martin Austin in The Womanizer and Charley Matthews in Occidentals are profoundly obtuse about females. But their lack of clear self-awareness would ensure trouble with either sex.
Austin, a...
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