First Love

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practice by literature's greatest writers. In the ART OF THE NOVELLA series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. One of Russian literature's most renowned love stories -- a vivid and sensitive account of adolescent love, wherein the sixteen year old protagonist falls in love with the beautiful but older woman living next door, plunging him into a whirlwind of changing emotions that are heightened by her capriciousness, and leading to a truly heart-rending revelation.