How Fiction Works

by James Wood

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 Carre, 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.

• ISBN10: 0224079832
• ISBN13: 9780224079839
• Publish Date: 7 February 2008
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 21 November 2008
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 208
• Language: English

Reviews

[celinenyx]

An interesting essay on different elements that constitute fiction, such as detail and character, culminating to Wood's ideas on realism. Wood has a nice conversational and occasionally witty writing style that makes this book accessible for people without a degree in English or literature, but his examples are sometimes rather obscure. I consider myself reasonably well-read and I haven't read even half of the books Wood draws examples from. He also has a clear bias for certain kinds of literature and I don't necessarily agree with many of the points he makes. Nevertheless, a thought-provoking insight into novels and how they become "alive" for the reader.