Today: A Post

I've noticed, for some time, a trend in the publishing industry that strikes me as bizarre. Take a look at the titles of two books I bought over the last two weeks. There is The Human Stain by Philip Roth and Songs Without Words by Ann Packer. Both of them have, in small print, "a novel" beneath the title. This isn't the case with every book, but it is the case with a number of them. I don't see Moby Dick a novel, or The Sun Also Rises, a novel. Why do we see this today?

Maybe there is a good reason and I'm ignorant of it, but I know that should I produce 70,000 or more words over hundreds of pages, I believe, as will those who heft my work off of the shelf, that what I have produced is indeed 'a novel'.