the.com/novel
a stranger's brain you wear for 400 pages and call it relaxation
means A novel is a long fictional prose narrative, typically book-length, that invents characters and events to tell a sustained story; as an adjective it means new, fresh, or never seen before.
from Both senses trace back to Latin 'novus,' meaning new — the same root behind 'novelty' and 'innovate.' The book-sense took a scenic route: Italians called a fresh little tale a 'novella' (literally 'a new thing'), the form Boccaccio made famous, and English borrowed it as 'novel' to mean a piece of fiction that was, at the time, genuinely a new kind of story. The plain adjective 'novel' = 'new' came through the same Latin door, often via Old French 'novel.' So a novel is, at heart, news that never happened.
- word origin
- Italian novella means a new, fresh little thing
- first novel
- Japan's Tale of Genji, written by a woman, 1000s
- longest ever
- Proust runs over 1.2 million words
- reading effect
- fiction measurably boosts empathy in readers
- the brain
- vivid scenes fire real sensory regions
don quixote — miguel de cervantes, 1605, considered the first modern novel
tale of genji — murasaki shikibu, 11th century japan, often called world's first novel
pride and prejudice — jane austen, 1813, most popular english novel ever written