Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
This book has a simple premise–that the best way for aspiring writers to learn their craft is to read (closely, attentively, alertly, appreciatively) the work of other novelists. Prose proceeds to...
View ArticleComing Soon: James Wood, How Fiction Works
Mark Sarvas links us to this write-up of James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works: To the business of criticism, Wood brings his personal baggage as a self-confessed Presbyterian Calvinist. He is a...
View ArticleSome Notes on How Fiction Works
I got my copy of Wood’s How Fiction Works from the Book Depository a couple of days ago and in between finishing He Knew He Was Right and The Maltese Falcon and starting Middlemarch and An Unsuitable...
View ArticleJames Wood, How Fiction Works
(Cross-posted to The Valve. Thank you to the regular Valve folks for the invitation to do some guest posting!) The dust jacket describes How Fiction Works as Wood’s “first full-length book of...
View ArticleRecent Reading
As the new term gets underway, I feel my opportunities for “leisure” (a.k.a. “not required”) reading slipping away–not that I’m sorry, of course, to have an excuse to read Bleak House again, or The...
View ArticlePosner on the "Decline of Literary Criticism"
In the most recent issue of Philosophy and Literature, Richard Posner reviews Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (discussed previously here): The problem with “criticism conceived as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
From the Novel Readings Archive One of the reasons I began blogging in the first place was to experiment with writing about books in a non-academic way. One of the first blogging projects I took up,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Best of ‘Novel Readings’: James Wood, How Fiction Works
This review first went up in March 2008. My brooding over deep vs. broad reading has had me thinking again about Wood’s criticism, which I wrote admiringly about when I first discovered him in 2007....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books
In the early days of Novel Readings, one of the things I was trying to figure out was how non-academics wrote about books, or (a slight variation) how academics wrote about books for non-academic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is another Book About Books for my ongoing reading project–the longest-running one on this blog. As I’ve noted before, I began reading this kind of book as a deliberate...
View Article
