How Fiction Works

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How Fiction Works

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780374173401
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis How Fiction Works by : James Wood

Download or read book How Fiction Works written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

How Novels Work

Author : John Mullan
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191622923
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis How Novels Work by : John Mullan

Download or read book How Novels Work written by John Mullan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-02-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, setting recent fiction alongside classics of the past. Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and Hardy's; Carole Shield's chapter divisions are likened to Fanny Burney's. Each section shows how some basic element of fiction is used. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers; others (metanarrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist. It is an entertaining and stimulating exploration of that ingenuity. Addressed to anyone who is interested in the close reading of fiction, it makes visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It shows that literary criticism is something that all fiction enthusiasts can do. Contemporary novels discussed include: Monica Ali's Brick Lane; Martin Amis's Money; Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; A.S. Byatt's Possession; Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club; J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace; Michael Cunningham's The Hours; Don DeLillo's Underworld; Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White; Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love; Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground; Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell; Nick Hornby's How to Be Good; Ian McEwan's Atonement; John le Carré's The Constant Gardener; Andrea Levy's Small Island; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Andrew O'Hagan's Personality; Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red; Ann Patchett's Bel Canto; Ruth Rendell's Adam and Eve and Pinch Me; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated; Carol Shields's Unless; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting; Graham Swift's Last Orders; Donna Tartt's The Secret History; William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors; and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road .

How Fiction Works

Author : Oakley Hall
Publisher : Writer's Digest Books
ISBN 13 : 9781582972930
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis How Fiction Works by : Oakley Hall

Download or read book How Fiction Works written by Oakley Hall and published by Writer's Digest Books. This book was released on 2003-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think of your fiction like a clock, a marvel of mainsprings and wheels, pinions and pendulums. It's an extraordinary organization of diverse elements, channeling energy and tension into the regular coordination of action and reaction, rotating gears and moving hands. &break;&break;Oakley Hall, writing teacher emeritus, invites you as his apprentice to study fiction's inner workings, the pegs and screws upon which a good story depends. You'll find the elements of fiction examined and illuminated, with insights into how they must interact to create a distinctive story. &break;&break;In sharing lessons taught by years of experience and by citing examples from dozens of esteemed writers, Hall makes working alongside a master thoroughly pleasurable, as well as an invaluable opportunity to craft fiction that is tuned like a precision timepiece.

The Nearest Thing to Life

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611687438
Total Pages : 64 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (116 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nearest Thing to Life by : James Wood

Download or read book The Nearest Thing to Life written by James Wood and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Serious Noticing

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374722048
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Serious Noticing by : James Wood

Download or read book Serious Noticing written by James Wood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

How Fiction Works

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429908653
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis How Fiction Works by : James Wood

Download or read book How Fiction Works written by James Wood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some 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 some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh? James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, 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, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.

Upstate

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374718202
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Upstate by : James Wood

Download or read book Upstate written by James Wood and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one another and find meaning in their own lives. In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen—a music executive in London—hasn’t gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa’s new boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he’s worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train 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 might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen’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, James Wood’s Upstate is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.

Making Shapely Fiction

Author : Jerome Stern
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393077691
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Making Shapely Fiction by : Jerome Stern

Download or read book Making Shapely Fiction written by Jerome Stern and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deft analysis and appreciation of fiction—what makes it work and what can make it fail. Here is a book about the craft of writing fiction that is thoroughly useful from the first to the last page—whether the reader is a beginner, a seasoned writer, or a teacher of writing. You will see how a work takes form and shape once you grasp the principles of momentum, tension, and immediacy. "Tension," Stern says, "is the mother of fiction. When tension and immediacy combine, the story begins." Dialogue and action, beginnings and endings, the true meaning of "write what you know," and a memorable listing of don'ts for fiction writers are all covered. A special section features an Alphabet for Writers: entries range from Accuracy to Zigzag, with enlightening comments about such matters as Cliffhangers, Point of View, Irony, and Transitions.

The Pale of Settlement

Author : Margot Singer
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 082033586X
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis The Pale of Settlement by : Margot Singer

Download or read book The Pale of Settlement written by Margot Singer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In settings from Jerusalem to Manhattan, from the archaeological ruins of the Galilee to Kathmandu, The Pale of Settlement gives us characters who struggle to piece together the history and myths of their family’s past. This collection of linked short stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life. In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother—a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust—with the story of her own affair with a married man and an invented narrative of her grandmother’s life. In “Borderland,” while trekking in Nepal, Susan meets an Israeli soldier who carries with him the terrible burden of his experience as a border guard in the Gaza Strip. And in the haunting title story, bedtime tales are set against acts of terrorism and memories of a love beyond reach. The stories of The Pale of Settlement explore the borderland between Israelis and American Jews, emigrants and expatriates, and vanished homelands and the dangerous world in which we live today.

Write Great Fiction - Plot & Structure

Author : James Scott Bell
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1582976848
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (829 download)

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Book Synopsis Write Great Fiction - Plot & Structure by : James Scott Bell

Download or read book Write Great Fiction - Plot & Structure written by James Scott Bell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-09-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Craft an Engaging Plot How does plot influence story structure? What's the difference between plotting for commercial and literary fiction? How do you revise a plot or structure that's gone off course? With Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure, you'll discover the answers to these questions and more. Award-winning author James Scott Bell offers clear, concise information that will help you create a believable and memorable plot, including: • Techniques for crafting strong beginnings, middles, and ends • Easy-to-understand plotting diagrams and charts • Brainstorming techniques for original plot ideas • Thought-provoking exercises at the end of each chapter • Story structure models and methods for all genres • Tips and tools for correcting common plot problems Filled with plot examples from popular novels, comprehensive checklists, and practical hands-on guidance, Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure gives you the skills you need to approach plot and structure like an experienced pro.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674503953
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (745 download)

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Book Synopsis Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by : Umberto Eco

Download or read book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods written by Umberto Eco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.

The Roving Party

Author : Rohan Wilson
Publisher : Soho Press
ISBN 13 : 1616953128
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (169 download)

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Book Synopsis The Roving Party by : Rohan Wilson

Download or read book The Roving Party written by Rohan Wilson and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] exceedingly powerful debut. Wilson's compelling story carries us through forest and over plains, leaving a trail of dead men." —Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune 1829, Tasmania. A group of men—convicts, a farmer, two free black traders, and Black Bill, an aboriginal man brought up from childhood as a white man—are led by Jon Batman, a notorious historical figure, on a “roving party.” Their purpose is massacre. With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize. Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Manalargena. A surprisingly beautiful evocation of horror and brutality, The Roving Party is a meditation on the intricacies of human nature at its most raw. From the Hardcover edition.

The Broken Estate

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Modern Library
ISBN 13 : 0804151903
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis The Broken Estate by : James Wood

Download or read book The Broken Estate written by James Wood and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2013-11-06 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Fictional Environments

Author : Victoria Saramago
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810142619
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Fictional Environments by : Victoria Saramago

Download or read book Fictional Environments written by Victoria Saramago and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization. From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1250183928
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Download or read book written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Fun Stuff

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374159564
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (741 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fun Stuff by : James Wood

Download or read book The Fun Stuff written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects twenty-five essays critiquing the modern novel, analyzing the works of such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.

The Book Against God

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429932120
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Book Against God by : James Wood

Download or read book The Book Against God written by James Wood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Passionate, Profoundly Funny First Novel from "the Best Literary Critic of His Generation" (Adam Begley, Financial Times) Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood's wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy Ph.D. (still unfinished after seven years), he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled "The Book Against God." But when his father suddenly falls ill, Thomas returns to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up and where his father still works as a parish priest. There, Thomas hopes, he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his own wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he soon reverts to the evasive patterns of his childhood years—with disastrous results. The story of a husband and wife, a father and son, faith and disbelief, and a hero who couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it, The Book Against God is at once hilarious and poignant; it introduces an original comic voice—edgy, elegiac, lyrical, and indignant—and, in the irrepressible Thomas Bunting, one of the strangest philosophers in contemporary fiction.