Bestselling memoirist Deborah Copaken Kogan (Shutterbabe) pens a haunting literary murder mystery; Between Here and April is the story of Elizabeth Burns, a former journalist turned urban mom, who goes looking for answers about the disappearance of a childhood friend and winds up tangled in questions she hoped never to answer.
The chapter/essay of How Fiction Works I found most intriguing was the last one: “Truth, Convention, and Realism”; the issues touched on within could easily be the subject of an entire book. What I find the most perplexing is coming to a definition of “realism” in the first place. Is realism truth? Mimesis? Traditional narration? Wood begins the section by citing the novelist Rick Moody, who says that contemporary literature has become dull and needs “a kick in the ass”; his disapproval seems to be aimed more at structure and style than content. Yes, sometimes a novel’s conflict-climax-resolution check mark […]
I’m excited to hear Jesmyn Ward read from her beautiful debut novel Where the Line Bleeds. Her reading tonight is part of “Rear Windows,” a BAM Cafe event presented in partnership with A Public Space. This last installment of the Between the Lines series also features a reading by Ian Chillag, films by Félix Dufour-Laperrière and Eva Weber, and a multimedia performance by Dark Hand and Lamplight. Go here for directions and more information.
In her ambitious first novel, Saher Alam uses the conflicted feelings of the groom, Nasr, for Jameela (his long-time friend) and Farath (his beautiful intended) —a triangle conscious of its debt to The Age of Innocence—to paint a nuanced picture of Muslim communities in North America.
In his chapter on “Detail,” Wood takes on a standby of Fiction I: the telling detail. Details, we’re usually told, should be significant, not gratuitous; they should give us some particular insight into the character or the setting. If there are telling details, Wood suggests, there must be untelling details as well. But do “irrelevant” or “untelling” details really exist?
How Fiction Works is simultaneously a gloss on the history of what James Wood calls “modern realist narration” and an encapsulation of much of Wood’s criticism to date. That is to say, in charting realism’s development, Wood revisits many subjects from his two previous books of essays, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self. Much of what I admire in Wood’s past criticism is on display again here. Yet the way in which Wood repurposes older material occasionally rankles. Consider, for example, the excellent opening of his introduction to Saul Bellow’s Collected Stories: Every writer is eventually called a “beautiful […]
Over the next week, I will join fellow FWR contributors Greg Schutz, Celeste Ng, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Jeremiah Chamberlin in discussing critic James Wood’s latest collection of essays, How Fiction Works. Feel free to join the conversation by commenting on our blog posts. In How Fiction Works, Wood approaches the elusive how behind craft by “ask[ing] a critic’s questions and offer[ing] a writer’s answers.” He explores such mysteries as the distinction between narrative and authorial language in order, in his own words, “to reconnect that technique to the world, as Ruskin wanted to connect Tintoretto’s work to how we look […]
In his wonderful Nobel lecture, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues passionately why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society, responding in particular to Stig Dagerman’s Essäer och texter. I greatly admire how this speech–like the best fiction–is at once intimate and inclusive, intensely personal yet widely relevant. Some choice excerpts: If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. The writer, the poet, […]
Non-profit publisher Dzanc awards this annual $5,000 prize based on (1) the quality of a writer’s work and (2) a proposal to undertake a specific community service project. This year’s winner, Kodi Scheer, will lead three 10-week writing workshops for patients, caregivers, and staff at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at U-Mich’s hospital. A recent graduate of the Michigan MFA program, Scheer was the recipient of the 2008 Creative Writing Prize for outstanding MFA thesis, and her stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Quarterly West. She is writing a story collection with the working title Gross Anatomy. To read […]
In his most recent novel, The Count of Concord, Nicholas Delbanco revives a largely forgotten but fascinating historical figure who was, in his day, an international celebrity: renaissance man Count Rumford (1753-1814). Brian Short asks Delbanco about the story behind bringing this character back, as it were, to life–and the experience of picking up a manuscript again after 20 years.
