coming soon: ‘How Fiction Works’ by James Wood
Written on July 14, 2008
How Fiction Works by James Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is an Amazon pick for “Best of the Month” for July 2008 and due to be released on the 22nd (though already available in the UK).
Product description from the publisher:
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.
Here is Wood’s review of Atmospheric Disturbances at the New Yorker (Atmospheric Disturbances is the “neurofictional” book I’m reading right now).
For those (like me) who might need a little more help, or just enjoy reading about reading, another recent title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form by Thomas C. Foster (Harper, 2008).
