His essential point is this: Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world. With the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently, Wood begins to shape a general argument whose moderate, neoclassical simplicity and preference for precision and clarity over mere vigor and potency seem initially like the hard-nosed wisdom of someone who’s read a million pages, seen all writerly tricks a thousand times and attained the detached, big-picture perspective of an orbiting critical satellite. Finally, to make himself even less intimidating, even more approachable, Wood (who writes these days for The New Yorker) has us know that every passage he cites in demonstration of his theories comes from “the books at hand in my study” rather than, as the common reader might fear, the entire New York Public Library or, even more distressing, his memory.

After noting his intellectual debts to “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky” and “the French formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes,” Wood goes on to compare his “little volume” to the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s musings on the Renaissance painter Tintoretto. |1 .i127219389 |b 1110003570955 |d mrlaq |g - |m |h 13 |x 0 |t 0 |i 0 |j 300 |k 191011 |o - |a 808.In the second of two short prefaces to “How Fiction Works,” an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure “the common reader” (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with all things cultural but is forever slightly short on time) that his prose is as free as he can make it of what James Joyce termed “the true scholastic stink” of so much academic writing.

|3 Contributor biographical information |u 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.-From publisher description. |a 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. |a Includes bibliographical references and index. |a New York : |b Farrar, Straus and Giroux, |c

How fiction works by james wood