Novel With No E's Novels & Stories

Funny thing: 'the book without an e' can mean a couple of different, delightfully weird books, and I love how each one shows a different kind of literary stubbornness.

The headline stunner is 'Gadsby' by Ernest Vincent Wright — a 1939 novel of about 50,000 words famously written without using the letter 'e'. It reads oddly poetic and awkward in turns, because the author forced himself to avoid the most common letter in English. Later, in a more modern and much-discussed example, Georges Perec (part of the Oulipo group) wrote 'La Disparition' in French, also omitting the letter 'e'. That work was then translated into English by Gilbert Adair as 'A Void', and the translator managed the same trick: an entire English translation also without the letter 'e'. Both feats are brilliant in different ways — Wright for sheer length and stubbornness, Perec for structural playfulness and cleverness, and Adair for pulling off a translation that keeps the constraint.

If you like these oddities, you'll probably enjoy 'Ella Minnow Pea' by Mark Dunn too, which plays with missing letters in a more playful, epistolary way. I once picked up a battered copy of 'A Void' on a rainy afternoon and kept stopping to laugh or marvel at how a sentence managed to carry meaning while skipping that tiny, dominant glyph. If you want a challenge, try writing a paragraph without 'e' yourself — it feels like doing crossword puzzles with hands tied, and it makes ordinary words look exotic.

Reading it feels like being in a room where one color of light has been filtered out. Everything looks weird and off, your brain tries to compensate, but you can't quite see normally. The world is still there, but it's tinted. That's the experience—a familiar language seen through a bizarre filter. Some people find that disorienting and annoying. Others, like linguists or puzzle fans, might find it fascinating to see how the 'color' of prose changes when you remove its most common 'hue'.