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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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Candide is a 1759 French satire by the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. The novella begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his tutor, Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this existence, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not outright rejecting optimism, advocating an enigmatic precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". Candide is known for its sarcastic tone and its erratic, fantastical, and fast-moving plot. With a story similar to that of a more serious bildungsroman or picaresque novel, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is mordantly matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. As philosophers of Voltaire's day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Immediately after its secretive publication, the book was widely banned because it contained religious blasphemy, political sedition and intellectual hostility hidden under a thin veil of naïveté. Today, Candide is recognised as Voltaire's magnum opus.

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You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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Did you know...

...that Joe Keenan's 2006 novel My Lucky Star won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2007?
...that when Jean-Paul Sartre's classic first novel Nausea appeared in 1938, it was reviewed by Albert Camus, still a journalist in Algeria working on his own later-classic first novel, The Stranger?
...that the short story "The Congress" by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was published in a deluxe edition with the letters made of gold?

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General images

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

Image 1A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 2Paranormal Novels: The Twilight Saga (from Romance novel)
Image 3Chapbook (c. 1800) of Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 4Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 51915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 6A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 7Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 8Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 9Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 10A 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 11Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 12Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 131719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 14"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 15Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 16Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 17First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 18Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 19The 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 20Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 21Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 22J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 23Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 24Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 251474: 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 26Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 27One 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 28Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 29The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 30King 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 31Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)

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