The Touchstone (The Art of the Novella)

By Edith Wharton

Book Overview

Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. The story of a young man who scorns the love of a tortured novelist, only to have her words come back to haunt him from the dead, The Touchstone shows off the skills Wharton became famous for in novels such as Ethan Frome and House of Mirth , particularly her piercing and delicious talent for satiric observation. But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel cri de coeur unleashed by a writer who was herself unappreciated in her own time. The combination of these attributes make this edgy novella a moving and suspenseful homage to the power of literature itself. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097460786X
• ISBN13: 9780974607863
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Melville House
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 0.3" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly Contemporary - 100 years ahead of its time

Because I am adapting this novella for Warner Bros as a feature film, I'm interested in hearing what readers have to say about it. This is Wharton's first novella, written at a time when she was still developing her craft as a writer; the story can appear woefully underwritten. Still, the story is mesmerizing and dangerous, a Faustian tale of betrayal, greed and the consequences paid, and the more often I read through it, the more hidden meanings emerge. When you read it, think of the lover who sold Princess Diana's first secrets of their affair to the tabloids, and the consequences since. What ever happened to that man? Perhaps, like Stephen Glennard in "The Touchstone", he has gone mad from guilt, which, ironically enough, might prove he has a conscious after all.