Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3606 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Irish Times
'the overall spirit and implication of this book are as important as its direct statements'

Scotland on Sunday
`this compelling essay shows just how deeply, sensitively, imaginatively and joyfully he reads'

Sunday Telegraph
'there aren't many book reviewers like James Wood'

Customer Reviews

Smart and uncluttered
Really enjoyed reading Wood on how fiction works. In a discipline rife with the verbose, the convoluted and the pompous, his plain clarity of thought is refreshing.
He's also unafraid to nail his colours to the mast and point at examples of very bad style from very established writers (Updike etc).

Great concept poor execution
To be honest this was something as an avid reader and an amateur writer that I really was looking forward to. With its arrival I was looking forward to understanding from a critics point of view what does and doesn't work and to get a full break down so that I could learn and correct where as a writer I was going wrong. The major problem with this book was that it really didn't decide where it was going to critique everything from modern books to Victorian and whilst each have their place on the readers shelves different times call for different trends, likes and dislikes. You can't really compare and analyse one with the other when theyre so different. Personally I'd have preferred him to stick to either modern texts or to Victorian so that as a reader we can see what does work for the modern audience as opposed to the old. As an idea its brilliant, as a product however its more an analysis and something that I feel is market specific rather than for all readers.

Our Strangest Critic
This book comes with a quote from the New York Review of Books on the cover that describes Wood as 'the strongest...literary critic we have'. The missing words are 'and strangest'. I wonder why they chose to omit those words? And what does it mean to be a strong literary critic? That you can read War and Peace while holding it between your thumb and little finger? Having said that, this a gem of a book, although perhaps it should be called How to Read rather than How Fiction Works because there is very little examination of either characterisation or narrative. Instead there are many examples from writers such as Henry James, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Henry Green with critiques so perceptive that you feel inspired to return to their works. Wood's taste is at once austere and baroque: he wants the novel to do good, but to be stylish and new at the same time. And at least he doesn't recommend the work of Lawrence Durrell!