The Short of It: Five Books You Do Have Time For

There are two ways of ending up with a short book: start with a blank page and build up, or start with a bloated manuscript and chop. Lorin Stein, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, wishes he saw more of the former. "Writers are pushing themselves to write longer than the story they have to tell," Stein says. But short reads may be making a comeback. Penguin Classics has issued three series of slim stand-alone and excerpted texts by Confucius, Marco Polo, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. The slim volumes were created to capitalize on people's "need for speed," says Penguin Classics executive editor Elda Rotor. And editors are always on the lookout for the next small wonder. "I'm definitely open to our publishing very short novels," Stein says. Just don't call it a novella, he says. That sounds so, like, 1899.

Here's a glance at five short works I recently read, one per day, over about a week. These were my criteria:

Juiciness Nothing tedious, nothing ponderous, nothing that could tempt me to put down the book and check my e-mail. Pure fun.

Brevity Readable in about as much time as it would take to watch a movie.

Grandeur Short in length but epic in scope.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville. Imagine a new guy showing up for a job at your office, excelling at his work and generally keeping to himself. One day you ask him to lend you his stapler and he replies, "I would prefer not to." A few weeks later you ask if he wouldn't mind reviewing a PowerPoint before you meet with some clients, since he's a good proofreader. "I would prefer not to," he replies. In fact, he prefers not to do anything, until you fire him, and then he replies that he'd rather not leave his desk. Transpose this to a 19th-century copyist's office (back when dozens of human hands did the work of a single copy machine), and you have the absurd mechanics of Bartleby. Ah, Bartleby. The first time I read this story I was a high school senior who thought civil disobedience was something Indian pacifists and Quakers did. Ten years later, as I reread it on the subway ride home on Friday, surrounded by hordes of corporate drones frowning into their smart phones, it clicked. How could Bartleby just disengage like that? Not just how dare he, but what enabled him? What exactly was he refusing? And—ding ding ding—what would happen if I practiced that refrain? Who it's for: fans of "Office Space," anyone with a parasitic co-worker, anyone tuned in to the absurdity of modern life, anyone with moral qualms about the rat race, anyone who would feel solace or perhaps vindication at watching a puny nobody with neat handwriting tell the world to shove off.