novel

We are quick to discard the familiar in favor of the novel.

In her 1958 novel “The Best of Everything,” about a group of young women navigating office life, Rona Jaffe spends a lot of time discussing clothes and how they augur success or failure.

Gaddis captures something that most novels about business don’t: that work is about talk.

The novel opens with the discovery of a body.

Indeed, it is not a novel at all, and it has been categorized as such only because of a curious dispensation afforded to the French to affix that label to any book they want.