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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, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

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.

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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Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson (pictured) published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet. The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001, attacks are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century. Critics identify influences in Pattern Recognition from Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist detective story The Crying of Lot 49. The novel is Gibson's eighth and the first to be set in the contemporary world. Like his previous work, it has been classified as a science fiction and postmodern novel, with the action unfolding along a thriller plot line. Critics approved of the writing but found the plot unoriginal and some of the language distracting. The book peaked at No. 4 on the New York Times Best Seller list, was nominated for the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award and Locus Awards.

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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

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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 1The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 21719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 31474: 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 4Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 5One 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 6Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 7The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 81915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
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 10First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 11Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 12Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 13King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 14Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 15A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 16Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 17Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 18Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 19Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 20"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 21Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 22Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 23Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 24Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 25Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 26Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 27A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 28Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 29The 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 30Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 31J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)

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