Your one stop for finding multiple professional reviews of recently released books.
How Fiction Works by James Wood
James Wood is the literary world's preeminent critic, and in How Fiction Works, he deconstructs the novel to illustrate how its different components come together to merge into a successful novel, or not. Spaced across ten chapters, Wood draws on examples from several novels to make his points about narrative, detail, character and dialogue. His analysis and polemic are designed to improve both the reading experience and the creative process in writing a novel. How Fiction Works has received mixed reviews with the Christian Science Monitor saying, "In How Fiction Works, Wood attempts to do for literature what Ruskin did for drawing: distill the messy alchemy of art into a single, coherent system. And for the most part - through 10 chapters, stacked loosely atop one other, and spilling over at the margins with erudition - he succeeds, spectacularly."
