World's Longest Novel Keeps Getting Longer

PRLog (Press Release) - Jul 06, 2008 -
Coppell, TX - Texas writer Mark Leach has published an expanded edition of "Marienbad My Love," the world's longest published novel in English, that tops 12.6 million words and also sets new records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Leach has been making a run at the record books with his still-growing story of a Christ-haunted filmmaker who believes he is called on by God to bring about the end of the world by producing a science fiction-themed pastiche of the 1961 French New Wave classic, “Last Year at Marienbad.”

“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” Leach said. “When I released the first edition of "Marienbad My Love" in March, the original length of 2.5 million words seemed plenty long for a 21st century Apocalypse. But the ideas kept coming, and the story kept growing. Now I feel like I'm just getting warmed up.”

“Marienbad My Love” is a massive work by almost any measure. It dwarfs Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a 1.5-million-word opus that currently holds the “Guinness Book of Records” title as the longest novel in English. “Marienbad My Love" is almost ten times as long as L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth,” which is widely regarded as the world’s longest science-fiction novel at 1.2 million words, and Madison Cooper’s 1.1-million-word “Sironia, Texas,” which made news in 1952 when TIME Magazine wrote that it was “apparently the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published.”

Leach also claims that "Marienbad My Love" includes:

* the world's longest word. Also called "the holy Jah," the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world's faiths. It means "god within."

* the world's longest sentence (3 million words).

* the world's longest book title (6,700 words).