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Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

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How Fiction Works Discussion Review: "Realism" in Fiction

by Natalie Bakopoulos

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 […]


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Jesmyn Ward reads *tonight* in Brooklyn – 8 PM @ BAM Cafe!

by Anne Stameshkin

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.


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How Fiction Works Discussion Review: Telling vs. Untelling Details

by Celeste Ng

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?


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How Fiction Works Discussion Review: Wood Echoing Wood

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 […]


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How Fiction Works Discussion Review: An Introduction

by Anne Stameshkin

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 […]


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Le Clézio's Nobel Lecture: "In the Forest of Paradoxes"

by Anne Stameshkin

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, […]


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Kodi Scheer wins Dzanc Prize

by Anne Stameshkin

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 […]


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shout-out: Preeta Samarasan on the lists!

by Anne Stameshkin

Preeta Samarasan‘s Evening is the Whole Day is getting some well-deserved list love. For the Guardian‘s best books of 2008, Ann Tyler names the novel as one of her top three (along with two other books reviewed on FWR, Miriam Towes’s The Flying Troutmans and Richard Price’s Lush Life), and Ali Smith also chooses it (along with Toni Morrision’s A Mercy and the reprint of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity) for the Times Literary Supplement‘s Books of the Year List. Congratulations, Preeta! And thanks to fabulous lit-blogger Bibliobibuli for the news and links.


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Indie and Small Press Book Fair

by Anne Stameshkin

Check out the 21st annual Indie and Small Press Book Fair this Saturday and Sunday (December 6 and 7) at the New York Center for Independent Publishing and the General Society, 20 W. 44th St. Here is a list of book fair exhibitors and a complete schedule of sessions, readings, read-a-thons, and other events, including a panel discussion on the future of independent publishing, a live interview with Kelly Link, and a debate between David Rees and Matt Taibbi. Donations are encouraged. Stop by and show your support for independent publishing! Also check out New York magazine’s “The Curated Bookshelf,” […]




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