The selected essays of James Wood - our greatest living literary critic and author of How Fiction Works
James Wood has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995, and a book critic at the New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He has published a number of books with Cape, including How Fiction Works, which has been translated into thirteen languages.
In the unspooling sentences and paragraphs of the many fine and
often seriously dandy essays that follow in this collection . . .
Wood shows himself a maestro of tone and inflection. His sustained
close attention as he interrogates the writers he loves is
genuinely something to behold
*Observer*
The two voices mingling in this collection give a beautiful, moving
sense of the stakes of criticism as Wood has practiced it,
vigorously, without interruption for 30 years... No modern critic
has exerted comparable influence in how we read . . . Wood writes
as if enmeshed in the text itself; registering shifts in point of
view and perspective with seismographic precision
*The New York Times Book Review*
James Wood is one of literature’s true lovers, and his deeply felt,
contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral
seriousness
*Susan Sontag*
Like all good critics, James Wood is a story-teller of the art of
reading, recreating the experience on the page for us’
*Francis Spufford*
Critics like James Wood not only help readers to read but
especially, perhaps, help the author as well
*Elena Ferrante*
James Wood is a close reader of genius... By turns luscious and
muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely
considered
*John Banville*
The most urgent and morally demanding critic around
*Guardian*
An authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time… Wood is
always urgent, lucid, and interesting
*Harold Bloom*
Wood writes more incisively than almost anyone producing criticism
today. His ability to transform complex, anxious thought into
lucid, exciting prose is everywhere present
*Janet Malcolm*
James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true.
He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity… To enter
Wood’s mind is to cross a threshold: from the reviewer commonplaces
that pass for essay-writing into the intellectual daring that
portends literary permanence
*Cynthia Ozick*
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