Novels
The Graustark novels are stories of court intrigue, royal disguise, and romance similar to Anthony Hope's 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, and its sequels. They were popular best-sellers at the time they were published and the original editions are still readily available in used book shops. The novels gave their name to a fictional genre called Ruritanian romance from Hope's work or Graustarkian romance from McCutcheon's. This genre contains tales of romance and intrigue usually featuring titled characters in small, fictional, Central European or East European countries.
The novels in the series are:
- Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne (1901) Gutenberg text
- Beverly of Graustark (1904) Gutenberg text (filmed in 1926 with Marion Davies)
- Truxton King: A Story of Graustark (1909) Gutenberg etext in HTML
- The Prince of Graustark (1914) Gutenberg text
- East of the Setting Sun (1924)
- The Inn of the Hawk and Raven (1927)
In 2009, issue 31 of McSweeneys featured a Graustarkian short story, as part of a series on lost literary forms. The story, Feasts and Villains, was written by John Brandon.
Read more about this topic: Graustark
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)