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A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction 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". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels.

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, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some, including 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 novels, including The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Frankenstein. "Romances" are works of fiction whose main emphasis is on marvellous or unusual incidents, and should not be confused with the romance novel, a type of genre fiction that focuses on romantic love. (Full article...)

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Raptor Red is a 1995 novel by paleontologist Robert T. Bakker (pictured). The book is a third-person account of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period, told from the point of view of Raptor Red, a female Utahraptor. Raptor Red features many of Bakker's theories regarding dinosaurs' social habits, intelligence, and the world in which they lived. The book follows a year in Raptor Red's life as she loses her mate, finds her family, and struggles to survive in a hostile environment. Bakker drew inspiration from Ernest Thompson Seton's works that look at life through the eyes of predators, and said that he found it "fun" to write from a top predator's perspective. Bakker based his portrayals of dinosaurs and other prehistoric wildlife on fossil evidence, as well as studies of modern animals. When released, Raptor Red was generally praised: Bakker's anthropomorphism was seen as a unique and positive aspect of the book, and his writing described as folksy and heartfelt. Criticisms of the novel included a perceived lack of characterization and average writing. Some scientists, such as paleontologist David B. Norman, took issue with the scientific theories portrayed in the novel, fearing that the public would accept them as fact, while Discovery Channel host Jay Ingram defended Bakker's creative decisions in an editorial.

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‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Wendy Moira Angela Darling,’ she replied with some satisfaction. ‘What is your name?’
‘Peter Pan.’
She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Wendy Moira Angela.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter gulped.
She asked where he lived.
‘Second to the right,’ said Peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.’
‘What a funny address!’
Peter had a sinking feeling. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
“A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blow open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.”

Peter Pan

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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 1Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 2Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 3Chapbook frontispiece of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, showing a man being tortured on a breaking wheel, late 18th century (from Chapbook)
Image 4Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 5J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 6Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 7A 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 8Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 9Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 10Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 111719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 12Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 131915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 14Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 15A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 161474: 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 17Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 18One of the first and most influential pre-modern picaresque novels was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century CE. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 19Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 20First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 21Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 22King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 23The modern picaresque began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 24Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16). (from Novelization)
Image 25A modern-day chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 26"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 27Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 28Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 29The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 30Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 31Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)

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