Breakfast at Tiffany's
Published with three short stories this novella cemented Capote’s position at the forefront of American literature. It is the story of a friendship between New York neighbours, good time girl Holly Golightly and the unnamed male narrator.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
10mentions
10people
2015–2026years
60% recommend30% neutral10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > you just limit the space to text
And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...?
Every book's in the training corpus...
Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?
- > At one end of that continuum, you have thrillers and action novels where characters are little more than a bullet list of personality archetypes, but a bunch of cool shit happens and the pacing is perfectly dialed in. At the other end, you have literary fiction where you feel like you're getting a window into the minds of actual people, but nothing really happens.
Part 1 of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is maybe the best example I know that works from both perspectives. It's full of interesting characters with different motives, and it escalates to a incredible firework involving all these characters and motives all acting at the same time.
The ending of The Great Gatsby is also like that. A big tragic thing happens, but not because of some evil dragon - it happens because the characters are what they are.
And then you have something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or On the Road, or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Where things happen because the characters are basically chaotic assholes, the kind of people to whom things happen and you want to read about these things.
- Just want to say that it's one of my favorite twists of history that the guy who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's invented "true" crime.
- Why? Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a remarkable book. If you’ve only seen the movie you might get the wrong impression of the book. I had to turn the movie off after just a few minutes.
- Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote).
- Typing this out I realize most are science fiction, but they're really good ones.
* Neutrino Overdrive — One day in the 1950s, in the desert of California where the drag racers line up facing the Christmas lights, a new challenger appears. He is tall with a large forehead and olive colored skin. He wants to race.
* Breakfast at Tiffany's — technically a novella, but reads really fast. Different than the movie and better (in my opinion)
* Flowers for Algernon — One of the classics
* Country of the Blind — in the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king
* The Last Question — this is reposted so much on HN and Reddit that if you haven't seen it, yet, just wait a week :)
* The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever — Just wow. Actually a lot of the stories in Carbide Tipped Pens are really good. It is a good collection.
* The Nostalgianauts — It is easier to find this in audio than as a short story. It is in some collection somewhere
