“A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

-Vladimir Nabokov

There's really nothing like cracking open a good book.

Nearly half a millennium since their advent, novels continue to be one of the most popular technologies for literary storytelling. Broadly defined, a novel is a book-length work of fiction, usually bound in paper (though increasingly digitized), and while the discipline of novel writing is correctly characterized as the creation of imaginative book-length narrative fiction, the term novel is often applied to works that incorporate aspects of other genres, such as poetry, reportage, memoir, even autofiction. 

The word novel comes from the French “nouvelle,” meaning new—and the genre itself is directly descended from the tradition of medieval courtly romances on the one hand, and epic poetry on the other. 

Many trace the first novel in the western tradition to The Ingenious Hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, the first volume of which appeared in 1605, and the second of which appeared, after an imposter follow-up novel surfaced, forcing Cervantes’ hm in 1615. 

While many exemplary novels are still produced today, as an artform in conversation with an engaged with a responsive reading public, the novel reached its highwater mark in the hundred years from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. That period saw a flourishing of master practitioners, from Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope in England, to Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal and Victor Hugo in France, to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the Russian tradition. 

Novels may be divided into many sub-genres, from literary novels, to historical novels, from romance novels, to spy novels, to crime novels, to detective novels. Each age brings forth its own innovators and practitioners, contributing to our understanding of the artform and expanding its potential. 

In our time, novels are one of the primary source materials for the modern TV and film industries, providing rich tableaux for episodic for feature length cinematic work. It's a constant struggle for many readers out there to get to the book first, before the film adaptation has had a chance to leave its imprint on the imagination. From Game of Thrones to Big Little Lies to All the Light We Cannot See, so much of American popular TV culture has begun with a riveting novel.