The Shortest Novel of Them All
A blackly comic flash fiction dated 1963, first published in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967) — the only story in that collection that had not appeared earlier. A woman's repeated failures to kill her husband end in marriage; "the best marriage in town," except that their children keep dying.
“The Shortest Novel of Them All.” In The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, 212. New York: Dell, 11 May 1967.
A blackly comic flash fiction dated 1963 in the text: a woman’s repeated failures to kill her husband end, instead, in marriage — “the best marriage in town,” except that their children keep dying. It is the only one of SFNM’s stories that had not appeared earlier in Advertisements for Myself, Cannibals and Christians, or elsewhere; its first publication is the collection itself.
Related pages
Editorial notes
- The story carries no separate Lennon number: first appearing inside The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, it is documented within that collection entry (67.11). Given a standalone Work page so its cross-vault link resolves one-to-one.
- Cross-vault: Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction treats it as short fiction (
nmsf-id: the-shortest-novel-of-them-all).