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How Fiction Worksby James Wood
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)"It has been decided of late that the face of literary criticism shall belong to James Wood....For Wood has come to be seen as something more than the best of his generation: not just the best, full stop, regardless of generation, but the one, the only, even the last. Beside him, none; after him, none other. The line ends here." William Deresiewicz, The Nation (read the entire Nation review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:What makes a story a story? What is style? What's the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely — from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings — Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel — plainspoken, funny, blunt — in the traditions of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read. Review:"Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer Aspects of the Novel in this eminently readable and thought-provoking treatise on the ways, whys and hows of writing and reading fiction. Wood addresses many of the usual suspects — plot, character, voice, metaphor — with a palpable passion (he denounces a verb as 'pompous' and praises a passage from Sabbath's Theater as 'an amazingly blasphemous little mlange'), and his inviting voice guides readers gently into a brief discourse on 'thisness' and 'chosenness,' leading up to passages on how to 'push out,' the 'contagion of moralizing niceness' and, most importantly, a new way to discuss characters. Wood dismisses Forster's notions of flat or round characters and suggests that characters be evaluated in terms of 'transparencies' and 'opacities' determined not by the reader's expectations of how a character may act (as in Forster's formula), but by a character's motivations. Wood, now at the New Yorker and arguably the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English letters, accomplishes his mission of asking 'a critic's questions and offer[ing] a writer's answers' with panache. This book is destined to be marked up, dog-eared and cherished." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"Great fiction has what Wood calls 'lifeness.' Ditto for this book, whose footnotes are as engrossing as the narrative. Highly recommended." Library Journal Review:"Highly stimulating stuff." Kirkus Reviews Review:"Deservedly famous for [his] intellectual dazzle, literary acuteness and moral seriousness....Wood writes like a dream." Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review Review:"It is not enough to have one Wood. What is needed is a thicket &3151; a forest — of Woods...[He proves] that superior criticism not only unifies and interprets a literary culture but has the power to imagine it into being." Cynthia Ozick, Harper's Magazine About the AuthorJames Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer in English and American literature at Harvard. He is the author of two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and of a novel, The Book Against God. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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