How Fiction Works
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · July 22, 2008
A Nonfiction pick for readers exploring How Fiction Works.
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- Who it’s for
- A compact guide to how fiction does its work, with enough bite to linger.
- Genres
- Literary Criticism, Fiction Writing, Books & Reading
- Published
- Farrar Straus & Giroux, July 22, 2008
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For younger readers: What's Your Story?, Writing Radar, The Wand in the Word
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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 inHow Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, fromWhat Maisie KnewtoMake Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step.
Continue reading
The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’sAspects of the Noveland Strunk and White’sThe Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Fiction Mechanics
A compact guide to how fiction does its work, with enough bite to linger.
Come here for
- close reading of fiction’s machinery
- book-club fuel with a literary edge
Expect
- layered craft talk
- serious, slightly sly prose
Where it sits
| Books & Reading | 64% |
|---|---|
| Fiction Writing | 48% |
| Literary Criticism | 43% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Creative Writing
- Authors
- James Wood
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- July 22, 2008
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Creative Writing