Perhaps for as long as since the Second World War, it seems "short stories" are significantly shorter than 30 pages (I suggest this length fairly randomly), but there was a time, perhaps roughly between 1870 and 1930, when writers wrote relatively few such short stories, and shorter works were often between 20 and 50 pages long, ocassionally extended to 70-100 pages, and it seems this high tide of novellas was also more typical in Germany and France than in England and America.

Hermann Hesse is one of the German writers who wrote a number of novellas and five of them are collected in Diesseits: Aus Kinderzeiten (1904), Die Marmorsäge (1904), Heumond (1905), Der Lateinschüler (1906) and Eine Fußreise im Herbst (1906). The collection Diesseits was first published in 1907, and reissued in an extended edition in 1930. This edition contains the original five novellas but in revised versions following the 1930 edition.

Each of these novellas is a gem, and the popularity of these tales can be derived from the multiple editions of them, sometimes in collections and sometimes printed separately. They all require patient reading, rewarded with beautiful descriptions and true emotion.

I bought this book in 1991, in Stuttgart, and this is the first time in nearly 30 years to go back to reading Hesse since 1992. ( )