![]() ![]() "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. ![]() Wood remarks that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it." His terrific bibliography will surely be a boon to anyone's education, but it's his masterful writing that you'll want to keep reading over the course of your life. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page. ![]() James Wood takes only his own bookshelves as his literary terrain for this study, and that in itself is the most delightful gift: he joins his audience as a reader, citing his chosen texts judiciously-ranging from Henry James (from whom he takes the best epigraph to a book I've ever read) to Nabokov, Joyce, Updike, and more-to explore not just how fiction works, mechanically speaking, but to reflect on how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works. James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carr, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. At 252 pages, it's a marvel of economy for a book that asks such a huge question and right away you'll want to know (as you might at the start of a new novel) what the author has in store. Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: The first thing you'll notice about How Fiction Works is its size. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |