James Wood

A book-length essay by the forefront literary critic takes readers on a philosophical tour of the art of the novel, in a wide-ranging piece that explores such topics as the definition of style, the connection between realism and real life, and the qualities that make a story. By the author of The Irresponsible Self.

How Fiction Works

Collects twenty-five essays critiquing the modern novel, analyzing the works of such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.

And Other Essays

The Fun Stuff

Kory Kogon

Suzette Blakemore

Covering such topics as initiating, planning, executing, monitoring/controlling and closing, FranklinCovey management experts offer practical, real-world advice for effective project management. Original. 30,000 first printing.

A Franklincovey Title

Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

The Nearest Thing to Life

The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book critic Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own. Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.

Selected Essays, 1997-2019

Serious Noticing

breve storia delle tecniche narrative per lettori e scrittori

Come funzionano i romanzi

Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The Broken Estate

"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick Following the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.

On Laughter and the Novel

The Irresponsible Self

Alan Querry, a successful property developer from the north of England, has two daughters- Vanessa, a philosopher who lives and teaches in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Helen, a record company executive based in London. The sisters never quite recovered from their parents' bitter divorce and the early death of their mother, with Vanessa particularly affected, and plagued by bouts of depression since her teenage years. When she suffers a new crisis, Alan and Helen travel to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel- Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that can be learned, or a lucky accident of birth? Is reflection helpful to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favourite philosopher of Vanessa's puts it, 'the only serious enterprise is living', how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, Upstateis a perceptive, intensely moving novel.

Upstate

Ekin Bodur

Kurmaca nasıl İşler?

Hayatin En Yakin Benzeri

Iyi Bir Hayat

David Herbert Lawrence

James Wood has selected fourteen of D. H. Lawrence's stories that demonstrate clearly the breadth of Lawrence's achievement in the shorter form. The stories are "Strike-Pay," "Love Among the Haystacks," "The Prussian Officer," "The Thorn in the Flesh," "A Fragment of Stained Glass," "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "England, My England," "The Blind Man," "The Fox," "St. Mawr," "The Woman Who Rode Away," "The Border Line," "The Man Who Loved Islands," and "The Man Who Died." In a long introductory essay, "The Success of Failure: D. H. Lawrence's Short Stories," written especially for this Modern Library edition, Wood discusses Lawrence's supremacy as a religious novelist who is also a modern writer with profound Romantic tendencies.

Selected Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born.

Descriptions of Oxford’s green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music.

Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonderfully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.

Afternoon Raag

Com título inspirado na citação sobre arte de George Eliot, os ensaios de James Wood neste livro buscam identificar e comentar as relações entre a literatura e a realidade. Diferente de como funciona a ficção, em que se detém no realismo, aqui Wood divaga sobre religião, morte, exílio, detalhe, a importância das coisas e descreve como a literatura perpassa todas essas temáticas com sua experiência necessária. Os quatro ensaios presentes no livro não são capítulos contínuos, mas se entrelaçam pela coerência do pensamento deste que é um dos mais importantes críticos literários contemporâneos.

A coisa mais próxima da vida

Come funzionano i romanzi. Breve storia delle tecniche narrative per lettori e scrittori

Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works - books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation - The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's pre-eminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches - that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Edmund Wilson - Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopaedic, eloquent understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and V.S. Naipaul. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming - which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards - as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

The Fun Stuff and Other Essays

This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo- lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is. In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

Essays on Literature and Belief

A short story like no other. Historical fiction melded with erotica, and The Doctrine of Venus at its heart.Step back in history one hundred years to the trial of a society beauty. Her scandalous affair lends publicity to a book that advocates sexual depravity-the Doctrine. Reproduced here in its entirety, the 3rd edition of The Doctrine of Venus has been censored in America for a century. A seminal work of domination and submission, it is a rulebook for collaring your lover. It is a manifesto for romantics and sinners. Shocking and arousing, and complete with a dozen erotic photographs of the period, it whispers temptingly to readers to try it for themselves.As sensational now as it was back then, The Doctrine of Venus is more than a hot read; it is a book that may change your life-forever.

The Doctrine of Venus

In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers. Wood re-appraises the writing of such figures as Thomas More, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf, vigorously reading them against the grain of received opinion, and illuminatingly relating them to questions of religious and phiosophical belief. Contemporary writers, such as Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon and George Steiner, are also discussed, with the boldness and attention to language that have made Wood such an influential and controversial figure. Writing here about his own childhood struggle to believe, Wood says that 'the child of evangelism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference'. Wood brings that suspicion to bear on literature itself. The result is a unique book of criticism.

James Wood

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