Piazza Tales

"This volume of short fiction includes three of Melville’s most widely-read works: “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas.” If you last read “Bartleby” in high school, it’s time to revisit it—in an age of economic precarity and the gig economy, it’s a haunting representation of what happens when a worker prefers not to continue with a dehumanizing job. “The Encantadas,” a series of sketches of the Galapagos Islands, feature some of Melville’s most dreamy and meditative writing—it’s gorgeous. And “Benito Cereno” is one of the most amazing and challenging fictions ever written: thorny, mysterious, violent, deceptive. It haunts and harrows a reader, and should. The short fiction features more narrative economy and unity without sacrificing Melville’s still-dazzlingly ornate prose. What I especially love about these stories is how tricksy and untrustworthy the narrators are—it’s hard to get a handle on who is telling the stories, and how their narrative limitations affect how the reader receives the stories. Melville is calling attention to how easy it is to swallow the account given by an authoritative voice, no matter how blinkered, biased, or harmful that voice might be. Throughout his longer novels, too, Melville certainly destabilizes expectations about the narrative voice—most of his novels have first-person narrators whose real name the reader never learns. But in the short fiction this challenge is all the more acute, all the more central to making meaning. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"