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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term romance. Such romances should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The romance, on the other hand, encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. In reality, such works are nevertheless also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century with Robinson Crusoe.

Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

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Original dust jacket

Lad: A Dog is a 1919 American novel written by Albert Payson Terhune and published by E. P. Dutton. Composed of twelve short stories first published in magazines, the novel is based on the life of Terhune's real-life Rough Collie, Lad. Born in 1902, the real-life Lad was an unregistered collie of unknown lineage originally owned by Terhune's father. Lad's death in 1918 was mourned by many of the story's fans, particularly children.

Through the stories of Lad's adventures, Terhune expresses his views on parenting, obtaining perfect obedience without force and the nature and rights of the "well-bred". Terhune began writing the stories in 1915 at the suggestion of his Red Book Magazine editor. They gained in popularity and, as Terhune was under contractual obligation to submit something to Doubleday-Page, he collected them into novel form. After Doubleday rejected the novel, he solicited other publishers until it was picked up by Dutton. After a slow start, the novel became a best seller in the adult fiction and children's fiction markets, having been repositioned as a young adult novel by Grosset and Dunlap in the 1960s and 1970s. Selling over one million copies, it is Terhune's best-selling work and the one that propelled him to fame. It has been reprinted over 70 times by Dutton and republished by a variety of publishers since its original release, including at least six international translations. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day.

Stranger in a Strange Land

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Did you know...

...that Kurt Vonnegut's short story 2BR02B is mentioned in his later book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where it is attributed to Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout?
...that My Brother, My Executioner, a 1970s novel by F. Sionil José, is a narrative about two half-brothers with opposing Filipino ideologies?
...that children's novel Nordy Bank by Sheena Porter, set in Nordy Bank on Brown Clee Hill, Shropshire, was awarded the 1964 Carnegie Medal in Literature?

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General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 2King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933). The novel was based on the screenplay and was marketing for the film which was released two months later. (from Novelization)
Image 3Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 4Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 5Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 61719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 7Chapbook (c. 1800) of Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 8The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 9A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 10Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 11A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 12The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 13Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 14Paranormal Novels: The Twilight Saga (from Romance novel)
Image 15Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 16Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 17Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 18Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 19One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 20Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 21Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 22Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 23First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 24Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 25Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 261915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 27Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 281474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 29A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 30"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 31Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)

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