The First Novel in the World

In the year 1007, a Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote the world’s first full novel. Called The tale of Genji, it tells the story of a prince looking for love and wisdom. In its English translation it covers 54 chapters over 1,000 pages of text.

By the Middle Ages there were many novels about kings and heroic knights but in the late 1500s the anti-romance movement took roots and villains became the main characters. The first such novel was Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, written in 1554 by an unknown author. It is the story of a poor boy who makes his way in the world by tricking his employers.

The antinovel was invented by the French. Antinovel writers insist that traditional novels sketch a false appearance of the world in much the the same way as television soap operas do - or as Murasaki Shikibu did. Instead of creating fantasy plots and characters, antinovelists emphasize the minute details of life and the world.

The author who wrote the most novels ever also is a women. Dame Barbara Cartland (7/1/1901 - 5/21/2000) completed a novel every two weeks, publishing more than 723 novels, which sold more than 1 billion copies in 36 languages, making her the best-selling novelist of all time.

The Real Name

Abhishek Kumar Yadav (Annu)

Abigail Van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips)

Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)

Acton Bell (Anne Bront)

Adinegoro (Djamaluddin)

Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban-Fournier)

Alberto Moravia (Alberto Pincherle)

Ann Landers (Esther "Eppie" Pauline Friedman Lederer)

Alcofribas Nasier (Franois Rabelais)

Alexander Barks (Charlie Christensen)

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Franois Thibault)

Anne Rice (Howard Allen O'Brien)

Anne Knish (Arthur Davison Ficke)

Arkon Daraul (likely Idries Shah)

Ashida Kim (Radford William Davis)

Seiko Legru (Janwillem van de Wetering)

Barbara Michaels (Barbara Mertz)

Blaise Cendrars (Frdric Louis Sauser)

Bob Hart (Al Trace|Albert J. Trace)

Boris Akunin (Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili)

Boz (Charles Dickens)

Branislav Nusic' (Ben Akiba)

Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Grimm)

Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva)

Christopher Hunter (Radford William Davis)

Clem Watts ([Albert J. Trace)

Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger)

Currer Bell (Charlotte Bront)

Curzio Malaparte (Kurt Erich Suckert)

Daniel Defoe (Daniel Foe)

Daniil Kharms (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev)

Danuta de Rhodes (Dan Rhodes)

David Axton (Dean Koontz)

David Michaels (Raymond Benson)

Dazai Osamu (Shuji Tsushima)

Dear Abby (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips)

Douglas Spaulding ([Ray Bradbury])

Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel)

Edith Van Dyne (L. Frank Baum)

Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro-)

Edward Pygge (Ian Hamilton, Clive James, Russell Davies)

Edwin Caskoden (Charles Major)

El Hakim (Abu Hanifah)

Elia (Charles Lamb)

Elizabeth Peters (Barbara Mertz)

Ellis Bell (Emily Bront)

Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter)

Elsa Triolet (Elsa Kagan)

Emanuel Morgan (Witter Bynner)

Erich Maria Remarque (Erich Paul Remark)

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan)

Francis Bennett (Edwin Keppel Bennett)

Franoise Sagan (Franoise Quoirez)

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

George Sand (Amandine Dupin)

Georges Courteline (Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux

Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott)

Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky)

H.N. Turtletaub (Harry Turtledove)

Hard Pan (Geraldine Bonner)

Harold Robbins (Harold Rubin)

Havank (Hans van der Kallen)

Herg (Georges Remi)

Hugh Conway (Frederick John Fargus)

Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg)

Irwin Shaw (Irwin Shamforoff)

Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz)

J.K. Rowling (Joanne Rowling)

James Dillinger (James Robert Baker)

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

Jay Livingston (Jacob Harold Levison)

Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter)

Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert)

Johann Joachim Sautscheck (Roman Turovsky-Savchuk)

John Beynon (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)

John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

John le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell)

John Wyndham (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)

Joseph Conrad (Jzef Teodor Na?e;cz Konrad Korzeniowski)

Korney Chukovsky (Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov)

Keno (Eric Killinger)

Kinoysan (Ari Wulandari)

Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

Lorenzo da Ponte (Emmanuele Conegliano)

Louis-Ferdinand Cline (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)

Mark Brandis (Nikolai von Michalewsky)

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)

Michael Arlen (Dikran Kuyumjian)

Michael Innes (J. I. M. Stewart)

Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker)

Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins)

Nancy Boyd (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Natsume Soseki (Natsume Kinnosuke)

Nisa (Nicola Salerno)

Novalis (Friedrich Leopold)

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

Ogdred Weary (Edward Gorey)

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton)

Pandir Kelana (R.M. Slamet Danusudirdjo)

Paul Annixter (Howard Allison Sturtzel)

Paul Celan (Paul Antschel)

Pedje (Purwadi Djunaedi)

Jean Ray (Jean Raymond Marie de Kremer)

Pauline Rage (Anne Desclos)

Peter Gast (Heinrich Kselitz)

Pierre Loti (Louis Marie Julien Viaud)

Piers Anthony (Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob)

Phillip Guston (Phillip Goldstein)

Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, when writing The Federalist Papers)

Q (Arthur Quiller-Couch)

Remy Silado (Yappie Tambayong)

Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

Richard Leander (Richard von Volkmann)

Robert Jordan (James Oliver Rigney, Jr.)

Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis)

Romain Gary (Romain Kacew)

Rosemary Edghill (eluki bes shahar)

Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Lger Lger)

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Sapper (H.C. McNeile)

Selasih (Sariamin Ismail)

Silence Dogood (Benjamin Franklin)

Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble)

Stash Cairo (Craig Hamilton)

Stefan Brockhoff (Dieter Cunz, Richard Plant, Oskar Seidlin)

Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis)

Student (William Sealey Gosset, discoverer of Student's t-distribution in statistics)

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)

Sutan Iwan Soekri Munaf (Sutan Roedy Irawan Syafrullah)

The Fredman (Karl Mikael Bellman)

Thoinot Arbeau (Jehan Tabourot)

Titi Nginung (Arswendo Atmowiloto)

TM Maple (Jim Burke)

Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford)

Vercors (Jean Bruller)

Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian)

Umberto Saba (Umberto Poli)

Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet)

Walter (Henry Spencer Ashbee)

Willibald Alexis (Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Haring)

Woody Allen (Allen Stewart Konigsberg)

Yevegny Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich Kataev)

Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka)

Quotation

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. G.K. Chesterton (1874—1936)

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood. William Shakespeare (1564—1616)

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. Franklin P. Adams (1881—1960)

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. H.L. Mencken (1880—1956)

A detective digs around in the garbage of people's lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage. Joe Gores

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. Honore De Balzac (1799—1850)

About Novel

The word novel originally derived from the Latin novus, meaning ‘new’.

The first novel, called The Story of Genji, was written in 1007 by Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu.

The first novel sold through a vending machine—at the Paris Metro—was Murder on the Orient Express.

Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter “e”.

Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, 1899, into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile - Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg's most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father's brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.

Nabokov lived in Berlin for 15 years and worked as a translator, tutor, and tennis coach. He won acceptance as the leading young writer in the Berlin Russian community. Most of his readers were Russian émigrés—in the Soviet Russia his books were banned or ignored. In his early works Nabokov dealt with the death, the flow of time and sense of loss. Already using complex metaphors, Nabokov themes became later more ambiguous puzzles - he was a remarkable chess player—that challenge the reader to involve in the game. ''Readers are not sheep," he once wrote to a publisher, "and not every pen (pun) tempts them." In Lectures on Literature (1980) Nabokov wrote that to be a good reader one do not have to lean heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle, or belong to a book club. "The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance."

In Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defense) Nabokov took the role of a grandmaster and played with the expectations of his readers. The protagonist, Aleksandr Luzhin, is a chess phenomenon, who becomes a character on a giant chessboard. Luzhin finds it increasingly difficult to make transition from the world of the game to everyday reality. After suffering a mental breakdown, he recuperates slowly with the help of a young woman. Luzhin starts to believe that a cunning opponent is trying to manipulate the moves he makes in his life. He decides to throw himself out of a window and notices that the courtyard below seems to look like a giant chessboard. Luzhin is right: there is an opponent and he is Nabokov himself, who makes the point that the story is an artistic creation.

As a writer Nabokov gained his first literary success with his translations of some of Heine's songs. Nabokov's first novel, Mashenka (1926), was written in Russia. In 1924 Nabokov married Véra Evseevna Slonim, who came from a Jewish family; they had one son, Dmitri. Nabokov's early nine novels were published under the pen name Vladimir Sirin. These works included The Gift (1937-38), a novel and an intellectual history of 19th-century Russia, and Invitation to a Beheading (1938), a political fantasy, in which the remaining days in the life the central character correspond to the length of his pencil. Also Nabokov himself wrote everything in longhand. "I cannot type," he confessed in an interview in 1962.

When Hitler released the killer of his father, Nabokov moved to Paris in 1937. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. With a loan he received from the composer Rachmaninov, Nabokov moved three years later with his wife and son to the United States—he crossed the ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first-class cabin.

Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University, delivering highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others. He also continued his extensive researches in entomology, becoming a recognized authority on butterflies. He also held a modest but official position at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The job lasted until 1948. As a lepidopterist he was self-taught, but his attitude to scientific work was serious, not dilettantish. Especially he was interested in Blues, the tribe Polyommatini, found all over the world. Later Nabokov estimated that between the years 1949 and 1959 he traveled more than 150,000 miles on butterfly trips. His years at the museum Nabokov described "the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life." In his boyhood Nabokov had already made notes on butterflies and in 1920 The Entomologist had published his article 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting," Nabokov once said. Nabokov's first publication in English was an article titled 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. Changing language was not easy - ''What agony it was, in the early 'forties, to switch from Russian to English,'' he wrote in a letter in 1954.

Nabokov's first novels in English were The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947). The Atlantic and the New Yorker started to publish Nabokov's short stories in the early 1940s. In America, apart from collecting his shorter prose of the 1930s into one book, Vesna V Fial'te, Nabokov published only memoirs and verse in Russian. Conclusive Evidence (1951) was an autobiography, which was later revived as Speak, Memory (1966), set mainly in pre-revolutionary Russia. When the Australian critic and writer Andrew Field planned to write a biography on Nabokov, the answer was: "I told everything about myself in Speak, Memory, and it was not a very pleasant portrait. I appear as a precious person in that book. All that chess and those butterflies. Not very interesting."

It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster did not share his view. With Lolita, Nabokov gained a huge success, although it was banned in Paris in 1956-58 and not published in full in America and the U.K. until 1958.

Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the 20th-century, in which the rhetoric of the protagonist both captivates and repels. The story deals with the desire of a middle-aged pedophile Humbert Humbert, the narrator, for a 12-year-old girl. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," he starts his story. Humbert is said to be a metaphor for the writer and his art, and for the old world—Humbert is an European expatriate—encountering the new, represented by an American teenage girl, in all its vulgarity. Humbert keeps a prison-diary of his lifelong fascination with pubescent "nymphets". The first is Annabel Leigh, who dies of typhus, but then he finds Dolores Haze, his Lolita, in a New England town. She reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. During the course of the story, Humbert loses her to Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographic filmmaker. Humbert kills him and dies in a prison of a heart attack. Lolita dies in childbirth as delivering a stillborn daughter.

Stanley Kubrick's film version of the book was based on Nabokov's screenplay. "I knew that if I did not write the script somebody else would," Nabokov said, "and I also knew that at best the end product is such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations."

Lolita allowed Nabokov to abandon teaching and devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 Nabokov published Pnin, a story of a hapless Russian professor of literature on an American college campus. Pale Fire (1962) was an ambitious mixture of literary forms, partly a one-thousand-line poem in heroic couplets by John Shade, partly a commentary on them by a mad exiled king, Kinbote. "I can do what only a true artist can do," describes the mad Kinbote himself, "pounce upon the forgotten butterfly or revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things..."

From 1959, Nabokov lived in Switzerland, where his permanent home was at the Montreux Palace Hotel. He continued to collect butterflies, which after his death were stored at the Cantonal Museum of Zoology of Lausanne. Nabokov's later works include Ada (1969), a love story set on the planet of Antiterra, a mixture of Russia and America, Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1975), in which Nabokov's own life coincides occasionally with the protagonist's, also a writer.

The writer's son Dmitri has undertook the translation of several of Nabokov's books from these later years. Nabokov himself wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one. In the Soviet Union he perhaps enjoyed greater fame than in the West. Nabokov died in Lausanne on July 2, 1977. Among Nabokov's major critical works are his study of Nikolay Gogol (1944), and translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's masterpiece Eugene Onegin (1964), with commentary. The ten-year-long work was first brought out by the Bollingen Foundation in four volumes. (Quoted from http://www.kirjasto.sci.)

Facts

TYPEWRITER is one of the longest words that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard.

The words racecar, kayak, level, and Navy Van are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left and these are called palindromes. The longest palindromes in the dictionary however are the words 'Malayalam', 'rotavator', 'redivider'.

"Almost" is the longest word in alphabetical order.

The word avocado comes from the Spanish word, aguacate, which in turn is derived from the Aztec word ahuacatl, meaning testicle.

Vanilla derives its name from the Latin word for vagina.

Gymnasium comes from the Greek word gymnazein which means to "exercise naked".

For Your Eyes Only

James Bond 007 is handsome, tall, drives a fast car, has an unlimited expense account, and always gets the girl. That’s just the actor. The character he portrays also has a licence to kill.

James Bond debuted in Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale in 1953. The novel was adapted for television in 1954, featuring Barry Nelson as 007. The first Bond movie, Dr No, was released in 1962, starring Sean Connery. David Niven took the lead in a spoof version of Casino Royale in 1967; it is not recognised as part of the Bond franchise. Since Dr No, the equivalent of half the world's population have seen at least one Bond movie.

Sean Connery starred in seven Bond movies (including the “unofficial” Never Say Never Again in 1983), George Lazenby in one, Roger Moore in seven, and Timothy Dalton in two. Pierce Brosnan was issued his fourth licence to thrill in the 21th Bond movie, Die Another Day. Daniel Craig had his martini shaken, not stirred, in the 22nd Bond movie, a remake of Casino Royale. He will also kiss the girls in the 23rd (officially 22nd) Bond movie, to be called Quantum of Solace. All the 007 actors are over 1,8 metres (6 feet) tall.

In the 22 movies, Bond has 23 vodka martinis, 6 of which he orders himself but two of those he never receives. The rest are prepared and brought to him. Most surprisingly, in his 7 appearances as Bond, Sean Connery utters the phrase “shaken, not stirred” only once, in Goldfinger. In Fleming's novels, Bond drinks gin martinis instead of vodka martinis.

The Bond character was said to have been based on Dr John Dee, the very first British secret agent. Dee, who lived from 1527 to 1608, was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a brilliant mathematician, magician, philosopher, alchemist, and astrologer. During his time, England was at war with Spain and fearing spies, Dee designed the 007 code for his correspondence with the Queen. The 2 zeros indicated "for your eyes only", and the 7 was a cabalistic or cryptic number. Dr Dee was not the only secret agent of the time. Seeing Spain amassing a new vast empire in the "New World" (the Americas), Queen Elizabeth secretly sent the pirate-turned-explorer Englishman Francis Drake (1540-1596) west with the added intent to harass the Spanish. It is known that Dr Dee and Drake actually met to discuss strategies.

However, Fleming explained the creation of Bond: "I extracted the Bond plots from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain, and a heroine, and there was the book."

Ian Fleming (28 May 1908 - 12 Aug 1964) was attached to the British Naval Intelligence Division during World War II. After the war, Fleming purchased a patch of land in Jamaica and built a bungalow on it, calling it Goldeneye. It was here, in his forties, on 14 July 1952 that after three attempts the first words of the first Bond novel were created: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning."

The Bond name was simply borrowed from the author of Birds of the West Indies. The character M was modeled on Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to whom in 1939 Fleming was made personal assistant.

In the novels, James Bond and Q actually never meet. Fleming wrote about Major Boothroyd and the Q branch but never mentioned a character called Q.

Author John Gardner took over the writing of Ian Fleming in 1981 with his first novel Licence Renewed. Sixteen years later he reliquished the 007 pen to Raymond Benson who debuted with Zero Minus Ten and ending with his last offering called The Man With the Red Tattoo in 2002. Three years on, Charlie Higson was awarded the challenge to depict the teenager Bond in a 1930s setting in a series of 5 Young Bond books, starting with Silverfin.

In the movies, Bond is told 35 times that he will die. He doesn't, of course. What he does, however, is make love 81 times: in a hotel room (20 times), London flat (2), at her place (15), someone else's place (2), on a train (3), in a barn (2), in a forest (2), in a gypsy tent (2), hospital (3), in a plane (2), in a submarine (1), in a car (1), on a motorised iceberg (1), in, around, under, or by water (25 times). Of the 62 Bond girls, 31 were brunettes, 25 blondes, and 4 redheads. Women moaned "Oh, James!" 16 times.