321 articles
Villette (novel)
Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë's final novel, published as Currer Bell in three volumes by Smith, Elder and Co., follows unreliable narrator Lucy Snowe teaching in a Brussels-inspired city, drawing on Brontë's unrequited love for Constantin Heger.
Vladimir Varankin
Vladimir Varankin (Владимир Варанкин, 1902–1938), Soviet historian and Esperantist, SEU Central Committee member, author of Teorio de Esperanto (1929) and the Esperanto novel Metropoliteno (1933), executed in Stalin's purges and rehabilitated in 1957.
Wandering Stars (Orange novel)
Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's 2024 Knopf novel, both prequel and sequel to There There, following Jude Star from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre through Fort Marion and Carlisle to Orvil Red Feather in 2018 Oakland; Booker longlisted.
Weep Not, Child
Weep Not, Child is the first novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, published in 1964 and the first East African novel published in English.
Western canon
The Western canon is the body of influential literary, philosophical, and artistic works used as a standard in Western culture. Debates over its contents began in the 1980s.
What We Can Know
What We Can Know is Ian McEwan's 19th novel (2025, Penguin Random House/Penguin), moving between a 2014 poets' dinner and a flooded 2119 Britain where a scholar seeks the lost poem 'A Corona for Vivien', inspired by John Fuller's 'A Corona for Prue'.
What's With Baum?
What's With Baum? is Woody Allen's debut novel, published September 2025 by Post Hill Press (US) and Swift Press (UK). It follows neurotic Jewish writer Asher Baum facing a failing third marriage, a dropped publisher, and a #MeToo-style scandal, and received mixed reviews.
Where the Air Is Clear
Where the Air Is Clear (La región más transparente) is Carlos Fuentes's first novel, published in 1958 and considered a founding work of the Latin American Boom.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Where'd You Go, Bernadette is Maria Semple's 2012 epistolary comedy novel about reclusive Seattle architect Bernadette Fox, who vanishes before a family trip to Antarctica; it became a 2019 Richard Linklater film starring Cate Blanchett.
White Teeth
White Teeth, Zadie Smith's 2000 debut novel (Hamish Hamilton), follows the Jones, Iqbal, and Chalfen families in multicultural Willesden, London; it won the Guardian First Book Award, James Tait Black, and Whitbread First Novel awards.
Who Is to Blame?
Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat?) is a two-part novel by Alexander Herzen, written in exile between 1841 and 1846, whose love-triangle plot leaves its title question deliberately open.
Wolof novel
The Wolof novel is extended narrative fiction written in Wolof, Senegal's most widely spoken language; the first published Wolof novel is Mame Younousse Dieng's Aawo bi of 1992.
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's 1847 Gothic novel published as Ellis Bell, follows Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the Yorkshire moors; initially condemned, it became a classic adapted into dozens of films.
Yeongung soseol
Yeongung soseol (영웅소설, "hero novel") is a genre of premodern Korean fiction whose heroes resolve the conflict between self and world, including works like Hong Gildongjeon.
Yiddish grotesque and fantastic prose
Yiddish grotesque and fantastic prose is a body of Yiddish fiction in which supernatural figures like dybbuks, golems, and demons are central devices, exemplified by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Yiddish novel
The Yiddish novel is long prose fiction written in Yiddish, a tradition that began with its first modern novel in 1864 and flourished in interwar Warsaw.
Yomihon
Yomihon (読本), literally "reading books", are woodblock-printed Edo-period prose novels that arose in Kamigata around 1748 and flourished in Edo, including Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu monogatari and Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden.
Yoruba novel
The Yoruba novel is a tradition of full-length prose fiction in the Yoruba language, begun by D. O. Fágúnwà's 1938 Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀.
Zimbabwean novel
The Zimbabwean novel is the tradition of extended prose fiction in Shona, Ndebele, and English, beginning in the mid-1950s and shaped by themes of land dispossession, the liberation war, and nationalism.
Zorba the Greek (Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά)
Zorba the Greek (Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά) is Nikos Kazantzakis's 1946 philosophical novel about an intellectual and the miner Alexis Zorba on Crete, his most popular work, translated widely and adapted into the 1964 film with Anthony Quinn.
Zulu novel
The Zulu novel is a tradition of extended prose fiction written in isiZulu, growing out of South African mission printing and school publishing from the early twentieth century.