Welcome to "Marienbad My Love." I assembled this multi-million-word, multi-volume work through calculation and chance. It consists of fragments of pre-existing texts both written and appropriated by me over the course of 30-plus years. I like to think of it as "the movie of all my labors and all my inspirations."
As of Feb. 1, 2013, "Marienbad My Love" consisted of 17 volumes totaling 17.8 million words and 10,710 pages. While I have not added to the book in recent years, I still consider it to be a work in progress. I plan to make it my big project in retirement. But that's still a few years off.
What is this novel about? Here is one possible description in the form of computer-written book jacket copy:
Leach's magnum opus, 'Marienbad My Love,' is a literary landmark, a testament to the power of technology and automation in the creative process. This is not a book for the faint of heart; at 17 million words and growing, it's an epic in every sense of the word. But for those willing to delve into the world of robotic writing, it's a fascinating journey through a universe ruled by homoerotic extraterrestrials, Nebula apes and The Fold-in Death. This is science fiction at its most daring and innovative.
Want a copy of your own? First, be sure to secure a sturdy bookcase. It's a big and heavy novel. "Marienbad My Love" weighs 65 pounds and 11.4 ounces. This is serious literature. Sometimes you can find print versions for sale on ebay. But not Amazon.
No, Amazon KDP banned it in 2016 because they had decided it provided "a poor customer experience" and "content cannot be read, is not coherent and readable and therefore will disappoint our customers." I recently asked them if they might reinstate me. I"m still waiting for a response.
Banned by Amazon. I don't mind too much. Here is a quote from an email I received in 2026:
"Honestly, getting banned by Amazon for writing something that disappointed their customers might be the most honest literary badge of honor I have heard in a long time. They built a store for books that feel safe. Yours clearly did not."
So true. I'm a bad boy, the type your parents warned you about. I'm not safe.
I like to think of "Marienbad My Love" as the world's largest "open source" novel. You are invited to copy, distribute and transmit this work, in whole or part. My intent is to encourage others to remix and adapt "Marienbad My Love" for their own purposes, both personal and commercial.
Mark Leach / July 2026
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MARIENBAD MY LOVE is part of Mark Leach’s larger system of Space Writing, recursive authorship, and machine-native literary experimentation. See About Mark Leach at https://www.marienbadmylove.com/about-mark-leach .
WHO:
MARK LEACH
WHAT:
LONGEST NOVEL
WHERE:
UNITED STATES
WHEN:
01 FEB 2013
"Marienbad My Love" by Mark Leach contains 109,465,318 characters (each letter counts as one character. Spaces are also counted, as one character each).
FREE DOWNLOAD
Welcome to the world's largest "open source" novel. The original 2008 edition of the novel is available for free download at http://marienbadmylove.weebly.com/download-marienbad-my-love-2008.html . And the first six volumes of the 2013 edition are online at http://marienbadmylove.weebly.com/download-marienbad-my-love-2013.html . You are invited to copy, distribute and transmit this work, in whole or part. My intent is to encourage others to remix and adapt "Marienbad My Love" for their own purposes, both personal and commercial. To learn more about how you can make use of this free offer, click on the Creative Commons link below.
"Marienbad My Love" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Read what others are saying about Marienbad My Love
The Hyperarchival Parallax / Bradley J. Fest / SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 / https://bradleyjfest.com/tag/marienbad-my-love/
The Space of Megatexts: “Reading” Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love
At over seventeen million words and consisting of seventeen volumes printed in dense eight-point font, the second edition of Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love (2008; 2nd ed., 2013) currently holds the record as the world’s longest novel and is what I have elsewhere called a megatext. Composed over the course of thirty years using a number of digital techniques, the result is one of the more spatially imposing works of literature to ever sit on a shelf. Because of this, it also appears that no one has really bothered to read it. Whether this is due to some prejudice against self-publication or critics’ perceptions of authorial vanity, the sheer unreadable size of the text has discouraged anyone from taking Leach’s work all that seriously. I believe this is a mistake and this paper aims to seriously consider a remarkable project that rebelliously pushes against the conceptual, temporal, and physical boundaries of the codex novel. The revisions made to the second edition of the text indicate that not only does Leach intend for people to actually read his book, but also that Marienbad My Love is in fact a complex theoretical statement about the novel in the digital age and a meditation on the present and future of literary writing. In this paper, I will argue that accounting for Marienbad My Love’s material size by finding ways to speculatively (and actually) read this unreadable text will encourage us to rethink how we theorize the novel in the twenty-first century.
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An excerpt from a letter to Mark Leach from ChatGPT, generated by a forgotten prompt:
Dear Mark,
Amazon’s KDP action against MARIENBAD MY LOVE is a perfect example of the clash between conceptual literature and platform-driven consumer expectations.
Their platform is built to maximize customer satisfaction in a mainstream sense—coherence, readability, narrative accessibility, predictable formatting. Your MARIENBAD MY LOVE volumes, sprawling and experimental, fell into the opposite camp: deliberate difficulty, unreadability-as-method, refuses to compress into screen-friendly bites. From Amazon’s perspective, they weren’t selling books—they were selling customer satisfaction metrics. The phrasing “cannot be read, is not coherent and readable” shows the metricized logic: if customers complain or “disappoint” flags trigger, the work is deemed non-viable.
From your perspective, though, the deletion of your entire oeuvre—not just one or two flagged titles—was indeed an overreach. It shows how corporate platforms don’t understand gradations of intent or the cultural legitimacy of conceptual practice. Instead of treating MARIENBAD MY LOVE the way they treat Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (which you cited in your email to Amazon, rightly), they lumped it in with scammy, low-effort content and pulled the plug. ...
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Gizmodo / Charlie Jane Anders / July 8, 2008 / https://gizmodo.com/thrill-crazed-space-bugs-swarm-through-worlds-longest-n-5023076
Thrill-Crazed Space Bugs Swarm Through World's Longest Novel
Got some spare time? The world's longest novel is available as a free download! Coppell, TX writer Mark Leach has just published an expanded 12.6 million word edition of his apocalyptic novel Marienbad, My Love. It's nearly ten times longer than the official record-holding longest novel, Proust's In Search Of Lost Time, not to mention the previously longest science fiction novel, L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth. And Leach says he's just getting warmed up. How does he fill so much space?
Marienbad, My Love is the story of a film-maker who believes he's God, or that Jesus is talking to him, and he decides to make a science fiction movie that pays tribute to one of the world's worst films, Last Year At Marienbad, in order to end the world. The novel is peppered with David Lynch references as well as sections from a faux novel in the style of later Kurt Vonnegut. And "thrill-crazed space-bugs," the Cicadians (pictured above) show up, probably to assist in the metafictional destruction of the universe. Plus there's a giant UFO hanging over Earth, Nazi/alien collaborators, mind control, alien abductions, and a mad scientist who's adding a substance called Fluoride9 to the water to create the world's first privately owned deity.
Here's a quote from Leach's press release:
"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."
Besides being crammed with weird ideas, Leach says 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).
Who wants to be the first to read the whole thing and report back to us?
Anonymous comments from the blogosphere
Huge fart ... Vomit … the world's largest Complete Waste of Time … lit fic wannabe with a tin ear … a lame attempt to attract attention … world's most unreadable novel … a stupid gimmick dressed up to look like a book … my eyes hurt with the awfulness that is this thing's plot … obtuse, pretentious, and unpopular… overly-long, self-indulgent ... I have no idea who's going to read this … Finnegans Wake has finally been dethroned ...The incoherent ramblings of an insane mind … I am not sure there is even a classification for this one … long stretches of surrealism, where we are in this character's head and not grounded in any recognizable reality...What was that?! Was this person using drugs or what? … I am so completely confused. I have no idea what's going on, what's real and what the narrator is imagining … It's terrible. ... NOTHING MORE THAN EGO MASTURBATION!
Mark Leach (1961, Waco, United States) is an artist who mainly works with contemporary strategies. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, Leach formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages that explore new ideas in language ideologies, crowdsourcing and aggregate authorship.
Leach creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, he presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.
His works feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise art history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies.
These ideas are on display in a variety of works, including the 17-million-word "Marienbad My Love," the world's longest novel. His book "Cutting Up Two Burroughs" has garnered attention on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet news blog (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/more-otherness-from-conceptual-literature/ ). Mark Leach currently lives and works in Texas.
Marienbad My Love is an experimental, avant-garde novel by American author Mark Leach. It is widely cited as the world's longest published novel in the English language, containing approximately 17.8 million words and spanning over 10,710 pages.
Key Details
Author: Mark Leach.
Publication: Originally self-published as a single-volume e-book in 2008.
Composition: The work was assembled over 30 years using a combination of original writing and thousands of fragments appropriated from pre-existing texts through "calculation and chance".
Structure: It is divided into eight books, each approximately 500 pages long.
Condensed Version: A shorter print edition titled Marienbad My Love With Mango Extracts was released, totaling roughly 285,000 words across 680 pages.
Synopsis and Themes
The narrative follows a disillusioned, "Christ-haunted" journalist-turned-filmmaker living in exile on a deserted island. He attempts to convince a married woman from his past to help him create a science fiction-themed tribute to the 1961 French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad. The story explores themes of Christian apocalypticism, secret conspiracies, and cinematic allusions.
Record Status
While Marienbad My Love holds the word-count record for a published English novel, it is often omitted from traditional literary lists in favor of works like Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because of its self-published status and use of appropriated text.
