Should You Read a Practical Text Cover to Cover Before Using It

As you circulate around your neighborhood bookstore or trawl the fiction section of Amazon, your optics may sweep beyond the words "A Novel" on many a comprehend. "The Mars Room: A Novel," "Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel," "Purity: A Novel."

"Duh," you may think, though it's possible the phrase won't cause more than a faint blip on your radar, likewise pocket-size to annals as a thought. As a book marketing convention, "A Novel" is then common that it hardly seems worth remarking on. When I started emailing people in the book publishing world to see if they could tell me why this tradition exists, I received multiple responses along the lines of, "I'm not sure I have much to say."

I'm not the only 1 to pursue the question. When a book lives in the fiction aisle or is neatly tagged as such online, does it actually need to announce itself as a novel? The answer to that is easy: We don't always encounter books in the well-organized confines of a library, bookstore, or due east-commerce algorithm. "A Novel" is not a subtitle but the reading line on a book cover, which explains its contents to a potential reader and serves as a useful signpost when yous're rooting through an unsorted stack of books. In theory it helps marketers sell books, by making their contents immediately known. This thinking seems to exist particularly prevalent in the American market. When a volume crosses the Atlantic from the Uk, "A Novel," is often added to its embrace, equally with the American edition of Sally Rooney's "Normal People"; the original version does not take this distinction.

Thankfully, "A Novel" doesn't be solely for reasons equally applied and ho-hum as this.

Books have used the "XYZ: A Novel" format since the 17th century, when realistic fiction started getting popular. The term "novel" was a way to distinguish these more down-to-world stories from the fanciful "romances" that came before, says Steven Moore, author of "The Novel: An Culling History." So, as now, it was a tag that identified the kind of literature you were getting yourself into.

And Michael Schmidt, who wrote "The Novel: A Biography" offers this: Because and so many novels of the 17th and 18th century adhered to historical truth in their settings, marking them equally novels made it clear that they were in fact works of fiction and not real-life accounts.

Explicitly labeling experimental works like "Pale Fire" as novels helped expand notions of what the novel could be.

Bauman Rare Books

In the early on 20th century, with the rise of modernism in literature, the reading line started serving a new purpose. Equally the genre became more and more experimental, publishers put "A Novel" on book covers to reassure people that they were approaching something familiar, while simultaneously stretching the definition of what a novel could be. "Pale Fire" may take been a mashup of poetry, commentary, and prose, but its first edition, in 1962, still had the tagline "A new novel by Vladimir Nabokov."

"It was a mode of telling readers that the novel was more than just a realistic story — information technology could be something experimental," says Moore. "Information technology indicated that the novel was a growing genre."

This use case has persisted. Moore recalls putting the words "A Novel" on book covers when he worked at a minor press in the 1990s that published "a lot of experimental, odd-looking things."

"We were careful to use the 'A Novel" tag to show that the novel is an expansive thing. In that location'south always some smart aleck who says, 'This isn't a novel,' as though the novel is narrowly defined," he says.

As much as "A Novel" tin can be used to widen the genre's horizons, today it's also used to create a hierarchy, to set a piece of work of fiction on higher ground than its peers. Norah Piehl, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, has noticed that it's often applied to novels "with certain pretensions to literary-ness." These are not the romance novels or thrillers that you selection up at the airport, the covers of which are stylized in such a way that you'd never mistake them for anything else. They are books with abstract titles and beautifully spare comprehend art that aim to win awards, that get reviewed by the New York Times Volume Review, that bequeath to their readers the cultural capital letter of existence able to say "Take yous read…?"

In the case of Anissa Gray's 2019 release, "A Novel" takes on a mischievous tone.

Berkley

Piehl tallied up the numbers and told me that at the 2018 Boston Book Festival, 35 of the l featured works that would be classified equally a novel had this reading line. Excluding romance novels and thrillers, none of which said "A Novel" on the encompass, the proportion rose to more than 80 per centum.

"Commonly, gracing a new work of fiction with the subtitle 'A Novel' is a vaguely pretentious flourish, a manner for authors to nominate themselves to the company of the 19th-century masters who regularly published new work with this semi-redundant act of genre specification," begins Chris Lehmann's Washington Mail review of Stephen Drinking glass's "The Fabulist: A Novel."

When information technology's not making a statement most what literature is and is not, "A Novel" tin serve a real, functional purpose. It's useful when a writer wants to deny that they're writing from life when that's exactly what they're doing, or when someone well-known for their nonfiction or criticism crosses into fiction.

"Terminal yr nosotros presented James Wood, the literary critic, for his novel, and I recollect in that instance information technology is useful for the reader to be like, 'Oh, this isn't a work of literary criticism,'" says Piehl.

While frequently self-serious, "A Novel" tin can be used to winking effect, similar George Singleton's "Novel: A Novel," A.J. Perry's "Twelve Stories of Russian federation: A Novel, I Guess," and Padgett Powell's "The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?" which is written entirely in questions. Moore says that when he came across "The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls: A Novel" on Amazon, he interpreted the phrase as somewhat mischievous, as though anyone would misfile the book for a how-to guide.

"A lot of people have had fun with the term," says Moore.

Cover designers frequently accept a playful approach to reading lines, as well. For "Exes," designers Claire Williams Martinez and Charlotte Strick hand-lettered "A Novel" onto the cover art such that it appears to exist trailing backside a car flying skyward. The words are tiny, a witty flourish rather than the meat of the composition. Yous could easily mistake them for a plume of frazzle.

Designers have found clever means to incorporate "A Novel" into covers.

Some gimmicky designers pervert the hierarchy of data on a volume's comprehend by making "A Novel" merely as big as the title and author name, which are more important than the reading line. "Immigrant, Montana," designed by Janet Hansen, has all three in the aforementioned color and typeface; the alternate title "Lover, Bihar" has been crossed out, as has "A Meditation" below "A Novel." Other designers use the fact that "A Novel" is a 3rd piece of information to their advantage, seeing it every bit an opportunity to use type in a more than inventive fashion. For "A Loving, Faithful Brute," Strick and Williams Martinez used the same typeface throughout simply sliced "A Novel" in half, placing it at the peak and bottom of the jacket to create a visual loop meant to represent the "inherited complexes" in families. You lot could never practice that to an author's proper noun or a book's title.

"Here, 'A Novel' was our friend," says Strick. "It was helpful to have the extra type."

For designers and marketers alike, "A Novel" is a tool that can be used in any number of ways and for whatsoever number of conflicting reasons, as wide-ranging and diverse every bit the genre it describes. People may not take much to say about it, just it does say a lot.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/14/18223954/a-novel-book-cover-reading-line

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