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You are using examples which are typically plural. Consider instead these singular forms:

"My shelf contains no Elf-on-a-Shelf" / "My shelf contains no elephant" / "My shelf contains no Hemingway book." / "My shelf contains no book by Hemingway."

(For an example of the third: "Don't look there for a copy of 'The Old Man and the Sea'? I detest Hemingway, and my shelf contains no Hemingway book." In this case, 'no' means something like 'not even one'.)

As for the others, "legs" rarely come in a singular form. There is (usually) only one king for an entire population, and there is (usually) only one soul per creature, so these singular forms are just fine:

"Snails have no king." / "Snails have no soul."

There's usually a lot of stars, but our solar system has but one sun, making the following singular form just fine:

"What if there were no sun in the sky?"



The 'correct' English is "no books by Hemmingway"


That's "Hemingway" ;)

I think the original sentence was already pretty weird, since I wouldn't say "My shelf contains no books." making it hard for me to judge what is not weird.

However, "Does your shelf contain a book by Hemingway?" sounds equally correct to "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway."

And equally correct to "My shelf contains no books."


Upon review, I realized the parallel construction in "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway, but it does contain one by Hemmingway" would help smooth things out.

More to the point, https://archive.org/details/stephencranebiog00stal/page/40/m... has this real-world example: "Although Crane’s list of books at Brede Place contains no book by James Fenimore Cooper, he obviously knew his Cooper."




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