Greg Schutz holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. His stories have appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Juked, and the Sycamore Review, have been anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest, and have been named among “100 Distinguished Stories of the Year” by both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor. His personal trinity of short-story writers includes Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Deborah Eisenberg.
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 […]
This season, a love of literature might seem vestigial, escapist. Moby-Dick won’t feed the Darfur orphans; Anna Karenina won’t hasten ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. These books merely delight us, nothing more. But in The Irrelevant English Teacher, J. Mitchell Morse argues that there is nothing mere about delight.
Set in and around the fictional town of Vaughn, Brown’s stories contain characters driven by duty and guilt down paths furrowed by their own lapses and eccentricities. A cloud of fatalism hangs over many; the weight of the past—personal, familial, historical—presses constantly at their backs.
