"The Daily Henry James" is barely two hundred pages.
There are barely three pages on why the coup failed and who might have betrayed it.
At barely five pages, the novel's third chapter, "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)," is one of the shortest.
For all that, Mr. Chapin's Titanic adventure rated barely three pages in his autobiography, "Charles Chapin's Story," written in 1920.
His introduction to the drama volume, though, barely two pages long, does little more than pay general homage and admonish directors to follow Beckett's stage directions.
Barely two pages farther on, the same story relates how, later, Ambros, while working as a room service waiter at the Savoy in London, made the acquaintance of a lady from Shanghai, about whom, however, Aunt Fini knows only that she had a taste for brown kid gloves and that, as Ambros once noted, she marked the beginning of his Trauerlaufbahn [career in mourning].
Barely nine pages long in its German edition (though it typically runs an hour or more in performance), "Hamletmachine" is the poetic residue of a Hamlet translation Muller prepared in 1976 -- for which he was promptly accused of plagiarism by two other translators.
"And a Partridge in a Pear Tree" covers barely two pages and yet it evokes so much as it describes Junior's dad's return from a drunken binge over the holiday period, then the offer to his son of a five-dollar bill scrunched in his boot: "Man that thing smelled like booze and fear and failure".
When the husband, eager to put it all behind them, says to his wife, "You didn't think it was real, did you?," he is ostensibly referring to the corpse, but he is actually referring to the affair, as if to say, "Why don't we agree that it never happened?" The loveliest story in the book, "Relatives of God," is barely two pages, and is a serene response to the murderous turmoil of "Decomposition".
