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How Fiction Works

By James Wood

(12)

| eBook | 9781446414484

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Book Description

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his firstContinue

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint?



Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

Critics

  • Novel tour guide

    How Fiction Works by James Wood 208pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99 At some point in the past decade, James Wood became the most admired youngish fiction critic working in English. And he built his career the old-fashioned way, on Grub Street rather than in ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Celebrate the force of fiction

    How Fiction Works by James Wood Cape £16.99, pp208 James Wood, once a Guardian book reviewer, is now professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. Despite its clunkily repeated preposition, the latter job description spells out a defian ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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Book Details

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  • English Books
  • eBook 208 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 1446414485
  • ISBN-13: 9781446414484
  • Publisher: Random House
  • Pub date: Dec 07, 2010
  • Also available as: Paperback, Hardcover and Others
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