Essays

Using a special in-house tool we have analysed the vocabulary of 50 of the world’s most famous Russian, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish novels — in their original language — to determine which of these works have : the greatest number of different words and the highest “vocabulary-richness ratio”, the ratio of the number of different words to the overall word-count of the work in question.
For the purpose of this analysis all punctuation marks (other than apostrophes and (…)

Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) was a shooting star in the firmament of 16th-century France, a poet, jurist, essayist and philologist who graduated from the University of Orleans at the age of 22, was appointed court magistrate also at the age of 22 and became a member of Parliament the following year, two years before the legal minimum age, for which he was granted special dispensation by the King of France, Henry II.
He was appointed by the French crown as a member of the special (…)

We have compared the word-counts of the 499 translations into English from other languages on our site [1] with the following results : from French from German from Russian from Latin TOTAL Number of texts 188 89 221 1 499 words in the original texts 623,463 852,257 835,234 51,688 2,362,642 words in the translated English texts 653,671 928,253 1,110,908 75,418 2,768,250 % increase 4.8% 8.9% 33.0% 45.9% 17.2% % of English translations with more words 83,0% 100% 100% (…)

Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the history of professional sports, the corruption of of the most important event in the American sporting calendar, the World Series of baseball, in 1919.
To quote from his vivid account :
"There was (…)

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One is first and foremost captivated by the sheer lyrical beauty of the poem, from the first of the seventy-five quatrains (or rubaiyats) :
- 1 - Awake ! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight : And Lo ! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
and the stirring early cry :
- 7 - Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling : The Bird of Time has but a little way To (…)

There are no doubt some novels missing from this compendium, but there can be no doubt that these 97 masterpieces from Albania, Austria (3), China, Columbia, Czechia, Egypt (2), England (22), France (24), Germany (9), Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan (2), Norway, Peru (2), Poland, Portugal, Russia (11), Scotland, Spain, Sweden and the U.S.A. (8) have all scaled the very highest heights of literary achievement in the novel form.
A summary count by author can be seen below.
see (…)

None of these 92 novels — from Albania (2), Austria (3), Belgium (2), Canada, Egypt (4), England (21), Finland, France (18), Germany (4), Hungary, India, Ireland (2), Italy, Japan (9), Mexico (3), Peru (4), Portugal, Russia (3), Scotland, South Africa (2) and the U.S.A. (8) — were included in Our selection of the world’s greatest novels, although they are all worthy candidates for the distinction of appearing there in the august company of Don Quixote, Les Misérables, War and Peace, The (…)

INDEX
Citations Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851) Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope (1857) Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens (1857) A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859) Adam Bede, by George Eliot (1859) The Mill on The Floss, by George Eliot (1860) Silas Marner, by George Eliot (1861) Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1861) Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens (1865) The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope (1867) The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles (…)

I LOVE AWFULLY BAD WRITING
I love awfully bad writing. Indeed I can say (with all due modesty) that I am quite good at it myself. This might explain why I am fascinated by the annual Bulwyer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening to a novel.
Every year since 1984 San Jose State University has been offering generous prizes to those who compose the worst introductory paragraphs to imagined novels.
This year marks the 21st year of the contest which was inspired by Edward George (…)