321 articles
Blurb
Blurb: promotional text coined by Gelett Burgess c. 1907; covers back-cover jacket copy and author endorsement quotes; studied as a genre and criticized as reciprocal logrolling.
Brooklyn (novel)
Brooklyn (2009) is Colm Tóibín's novel about Eilis Lacey, an Irishwoman who emigrates from Enniscorthy to 1950s Brooklyn; Costa Novel Award winner, Booker-longlisted, adapted into a 2015 Oscar-nominated film, with sequel Long Island (2024).
Bunny (novel)
Bunny is a 2019 satirical horror novel by Canadian writer Mona Awad, about a scholarship student drawn into a clique of classmates who call each other "Bunny."
Burmese novel
The Burmese novel is the prose fiction form of Burmese (Myanmar) literature, emerging in the early twentieth century under British rule; the first two novels appeared in 1904.
Burmese short story
The Burmese short story (wutthu to) is a prose fiction genre in the Burmese language, first established with Shwe U Daung's 1917 story in Thuriya magazine.
Calling Sehmat
Calling Sehmat is Harinder Sikka's espionage novel about Sehmat, a Kashmiri woman who married into a Pakistani military family and spied for India during the 1971 war; adapted into the 2018 film Raazi.
Camp prose
Camp prose (Russian: лагерная проза, lagernaya proza) is Russian literary and documentary writing about Soviet forced-labor camps, written most often by former prisoners; classical authors include Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.
Caribbean novel
The Caribbean novel is the body of long-form fiction by Caribbean writers and their diasporas, in English, French, and Spanish, shaped by colonization, slavery, decolonization, and migration.
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Chain-Gang All-Stars (チェーンギャング・オールスターズ) is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's 2023 debut dystopian satire novel, set in an alternate US where prisoners fight televised CAPE death matches for freedom; a National Book Award finalist and Alex Award winner.
Chaka
Chaka is a Sesotho novel by Thomas Mofolo, written 1909 to 1910 and published in 1925, that fictionalizes the life of the Zulu king Shaka.
Characterization
Characterization is the literary process of constructing a character in narrative, also called character presentation. It works through direct statement of traits or indirect cues (speech, action, thought, appearance) from which readers infer qualities; Aristotle ranked it below plot, and it became central with the 19th-century realist novel.
Chinese avant-garde fiction
Chinese avant-garde fiction (先锋小说) is a movement in Chinese literature from the mid-1980s, associated with Ma Yuan, Can Xue, and Yu Hua, defined by radical formal experimentation.
Chinese classics
Chinese classics (五經 Five Classics; 四書 Four Books): the Confucian canonical corpus of poetry, documents, rites, changes, and annals canonized under Han Emperor Wu and recentered by Zhu Xi in 1190.
Classic Chinese Novels
Classic Chinese novels: Ming-Qing vernacular long fiction in the chaptered zhanghui form, centered on the Four Great Classical Novels (三国演义, 水浒传, 西游记, 红楼梦), their canonization, and worldwide translation.
Classics
Classics, also called classical studies, is the study of classical antiquity, traditionally the Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and art read in Ancient Greek and Latin.
Cloud Atlas (novel)
Cloud Atlas is a 2004 novel by David Mitchell made of six nested stories, from an 1850 Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic future, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Conflict (narrative)
Conflict (narrative), or narrative conflict, is the relation between a character's goal and a resistant force, divided into internal and external types such as character versus society.
Contemporary Egyptian novel
The contemporary Egyptian novel is novel-length fiction written in Egypt from roughly the late twentieth century to the present, growing out of a realist tradition and absorbing social and political change.
Contemporary Syrian novel
The contemporary Syrian novel is Arabic-language long-form fiction by Syrian authors, pioneered by Hanna Mina and Abdal-Salam al-Ujayli and shaped since 2011 by war and displacement.
Contrapposto (novel)
Contrapposto is a 2026 novel by Dave Eggers that follows artist Robert Dibb and his lifelong friend Olympia Argyros from childhood in Indiana into their sixties.
Conversations with Friends
Conversations with Friends is the 2017 debut novel of Irish writer Sally Rooney, about Dublin student Frances, her ex-girlfriend Bobbi, and the married couple they befriend.
Creation Lake
Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner's fourth novel (Scribner, September 3, 2024; 416 pages), about ex-FBI agent Sadie Smith infiltrating the Le Moulin eco-activist commune in Guyenne, France, whose cave-dwelling mentor Bruno Lacombe emails about Neanderthals. Booker 2024 shortlist; National Book Award 2024 longlist; distinct from any other work of the same name.
Cutting for Stone
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese's 2009 debut novel (Knopf), follows twins Marion and Shiva Stone, born to an Indian nun and British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; a bestselling medical family saga of exile and medicine.
Daphnis and Chloe
Daphnis and Chloe is an ancient Greek prose romance by Longus, written in the 2nd or 3rd century CE about two foundlings discovering love on Lesbos.
Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's 1940 political novel (German original "Rubaschow"), portrays Old Bolshevik Rubashov's interrogation and confession during Stalin's show trials; lost German manuscript rediscovered 2015, retranslated 2019.
Dead Souls (Мёртвые души)
Dead Souls (Мёртвые души) is Nikolai Gogol's satirical prose 'poem' of 1842, written 1835–1852, in which Chichikov buys deceased serfs still on census rolls to mortgage them; a Dantean three-part plan, only volume one published.
Demon Copperhead
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's 2022 Harper novel, retells Dickens's David Copperfield in Appalachian Virginia during the opioid crisis, following Damon Fields through foster care and addiction; it won the shared 2023 Pulitzer Prize and the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Departure(s)
Departure(s) is Julian Barnes's 2026 novel, announced as his final book: an autofiction in which narrator Julian recounts twice matchmaking his friends Stephen and Jean, 40 years apart, mixed with memoir of memory, illness, and aging.
Devdas
Devdas (দেবদাস), also Devdās, is Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1917 Bengali tragic-romance novella about a self-destructive lover. Written circa 1901 in Bhagalpur, serialized in Bharatvarsa, it became South Asia's most-filmed non-epic story, notably via Bimal Roy's 1955 and Bhansali's 2002 Hindi films.
Diary (novel)
Diary is a 2003 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, a modern horror story with dark humor, written as a diary by Misty Wilmot, a waitress on Waytansea Island.