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James Wood

James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.

From the London Review dated 14 November 2002

Credulity

  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The writing manages its vividness not by flouncing into Fine Writing but by combining a literary register with Pi’s simpler, earnest voice (’it was positively deafening’). Still, although Pi certainly has a voice, the literary cost of his boyish naivety is that he is somewhat empty as a character. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • How Fiction Works (2008)  Buy this book
  • The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004)
  • The Book Against God (2003)
  • The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999)

Search the web for James Wood: Google · Yahoo! · AltaVista · Wikipedia

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Credulity · 14 November 2002

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Addicted to Unpredictability · 26 November 1998

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From the LRB letters page