Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Encantadas and Other Stories | - | Herman Melville | Buy |
| 2 | The Piazza Tales | - | Herman Melville | Buy |
| 3 | The Apple-Tree Table | 1922 | Herman Melville | Buy |
| 4 | I Would Prefer Not To | 2021 | Herman Melville | Buy |
Melville’s short fiction appeared largely in magazines during the 1850s, when he was struggling to rebuild his reputation after the commercial failures of “Moby Dick” and “Pierre.” The stories collected in “The Piazza Tales” (1856) show a writer experimenting with compressed, ambiguous narratives quite different from his longer sea novels.
“The Encantadas” is a series of sketches about the Galapagos Islands, describing them as desolate, volcanic, and haunted. The collection also includes “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” two works that have since become central texts in American literature courses. “The Apple-Tree Table,” published separately in 1922 from magazine sources, is a lighter piece about a mysterious table that produces strange sounds.
“I Would Prefer Not To,” published in 2021, is a modern collection gathering Melville’s shorter works for contemporary readers. His magazine fiction as a whole shows a writer whose imagination ranged well beyond sea adventures, touching on themes of isolation, moral ambiguity, and the limits of human understanding.