Discover 27 short novels in PDF, completely free. From Kafka's The Metamorphosis to Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, this collection gathers classic novellas you can read in a single sitting.
Every novella here runs under 200 pages, so you can finish one in an afternoon. The list spans gothic stories by Stevenson, Le Fanu and Wilde, philosophical tales by Voltaire and Hesse, and quiet realism by Chopin, Wharton and James.
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Classics
Short Novels
Browse all 27 classic novellas in the collection, listed in reading order. Each PDF is free to read online or download.
Kafka's classic 1915 novella about Gregor Samsa, who wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, and the cold reaction of the family he has supported for years.
Dickens's 1843 ghost story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly Londoner visited by three Christmas spirits in a single night and led to confront a wasted life.
An early Dostoevsky novella from 1848 about a lonely dreamer in St. Petersburg who meets a young woman during four luminous summer nights and falls in love against his own promise.
Thomas Mann's 1912 novella about Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer whose visit to Venice becomes a slow descent into obsession with a beautiful Polish boy.
Saint-Exupéry's beloved 1943 fable about a pilot stranded in the desert and the strange little prince he meets, told with the author's own watercolour illustrations.
Hesse's 1927 novel about Harry Haller, an isolated middle-aged intellectual torn between his rational human side and his wild inner wolf, who finds release through a strange magic theatre.
Le Fanu's 1872 gothic vampire novella that predates Dracula by twenty-five years, narrated by a young woman who befriends the mysterious and seductive Carmilla in a remote Styrian castle.
Oscar Wilde's 1887 comic ghost story about an American family that buys an old English castle and refuses to be intimidated by the resident Sir Simon, the ghost who has haunted it for centuries.
Conrad's 1899 novella in which the sailor Marlow recounts his journey up the Congo River in search of the trader Kurtz, and the moral darkness he finds at the heart of colonial Africa.
Bulgakov's 1925 satirical novella about Professor Preobrazhensky, a Moscow surgeon who transplants human organs into a stray dog and watches the experiment turn into a savage critique of Soviet society.
Conan Doyle's 1887 novel that introduces Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who together untangle a London murder whose roots reach back to a vengeance born in the Utah desert.
Virginia Woolf's 1925 modernist novel that follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single June day in post-war London as she prepares an evening party, while the wounded soldier Septimus Smith drifts toward tragedy.
Voltaire's 1759 satirical tale about young Candide, expelled from his castle and thrown into wars, earthquakes, and exotic kingdoms, all while his tutor insists this is the best of all possible worlds.
Hesse's 1922 spiritual novel about a young Brahmin who leaves home in search of enlightenment, passing through asceticism, sensual pleasure, and trade before finding peace by the river.
H. G. Wells's 1895 science fiction novella in which a Victorian inventor builds a machine that carries him to the year 802,701 and to the dying earth of a far more distant future.
Tolstoy's 1886 novella about a successful Russian magistrate whose sudden, painful illness forces him to confront the emptiness of the respectable life he has built.
Turgenev's 1860 autobiographical novella about Vladimir, a sixteen-year-old who falls in love with the older and capricious Princess Zinaida and discovers the brutal secret of who else loves her.
Conan Doyle's 1902 Sherlock Holmes mystery set on the foggy moors of Devonshire, where a legendary spectral hound seems to be claiming the lives of the Baskerville heirs.
Kate Chopin's 1899 novel about Edna Pontellier, a New Orleans wife and mother who, after a summer in Grand Isle, begins a quiet rebellion against the roles her time and class demand of her.
Henry James's 1878 novella about a young American woman traveling through Europe whose unconventional manners scandalize an expatriate community in Rome.
Jane Austen's early epistolary novella, published posthumously in 1871, in which the widowed Lady Susan manipulates suitors for herself and her unwilling teenage daughter through a sequence of cunning letters.
Henry James's 1898 ghost story about a young governess who arrives at an isolated country estate to care for two orphaned children and becomes convinced that the previous staff are haunting them.
Oscar Wilde's only novel, published in 1890, about a young man who keeps his beauty intact while a hidden portrait records every act of vanity, cruelty and corruption he commits.
Kafka's 1925 novel about Josef K., a bank clerk who is arrested one morning for a crime that is never named and dragged into a court whose proceedings make less sense the deeper he descends.
Dostoevsky's 1864 monologue from a bitter retired civil servant in St. Petersburg, a foundational text of literary existentialism that anticipates the modern anti-hero.
