{"id":16135,"date":"2008-12-11T07:04:42","date_gmt":"2008-12-11T12:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=16135"},"modified":"2014-10-15T13:54:38","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T17:54:38","slug":"the-longest-sentence-in-published-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2008\/12\/11\/the-longest-sentence-in-published-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"The longest sentence in published literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 2010, Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester will be publishing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/features\/lifestyle\/chi-longest-sentence-1209dec09,0,1187967.story\" target=\"_blank\">the 517-page French novel <i>Zone<\/i>, written by Mathias Enard<\/a>.  According to the linked piece, the entire novel, save for a flashback, is made up of a single 150,000-word sentence.<\/p>\n<p>As for how many words that sentence will have when translated into English, the article doesn&#8217;t say.  &#8220;It has a lot of commas,&#8221; according to translator Chad Post.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, here&#8217;s the novel as compared to its closest competitors:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. 150,000 words in <i>Zone,<\/i> by Mathias Enard (published in French in 2008)<\/p>\n<p>2. 40,000 words in <i>Gates of Paradise,<\/i> by Jerzy Andrzejewski (Polish, 1960)<\/p>\n<p>3. 30,000 words in <i>Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age,<\/i> by Bohumil Hrabal (Czech, 1964)<\/p>\n<p>4. 13,995 words in <i>The Rotters&#8217; Club,<\/i> by Jonathan Coe (English, 2001)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I have no idea who wrote the longest sentence in science fiction, fantasy, or horror, but for the moment, I&#8217;m placing my bet on Barry Malzberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2010, Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester will be publishing the 517-page French novel Zone, written by Mathias Enard. According to the linked piece, the entire novel, save for a flashback, is made up of a single 150,000-word sentence. As for how many words that sentence will have when translated into English, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16136,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16135\/revisions\/16136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}