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The Nearest Thing To Life
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives, and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works – among others, Chekhov’s story ‘The Kiss’, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charge...
How Fiction Works
Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from 'the strongest ... literary critic we have' (New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition. What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint? In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes ...
Upstate
Upstate is a funny, moving family drama from one of the world’s most influential literary critics. ‘Thoughtful and though-provoking’ Financial Times Alan Querry, a successful property developer from the north of England, has two daughters: Vanessa, a philosopher who lives and teaches in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Helen, a record company executive based in London. The sisters never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother, with Vanessa particularly affected, and plagued by bouts of depression since her teenage years. When she suffers a new crisis, Alan and Helen travel to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Rich in subtle human insight, and vivid with a sense of place, Upstate is a perceptive, intensely poignant novel.
Eye of the Beast
In the summer of 1993, James Wood brought terror to the unassuming town of Pocatello, Idaho. Little did the friendly community realize it had opened its arms to serial killer. Wood, the stranger in town, was polite and soft-spoken. He looked quite ordinary—he was a master at appearing normal. In late June, Wood abducted and murdered Jeralee Underwood, the eleven-year-old daughter of a devout Mormon family. The entire region was shocked and outraged. Now, author Terry Adams teams with lead investigator Scott Shaw and forensic psychologist Mary Brooks-Mueller to bring readers a unique perspective on this case. Shaw takes us into the heart of an exhaustive investigation, while Brooks-Mueller shows us the mind of a true sexual psychopath. Having spent years researching this case, the authors are skillful in recreating this true story about James Woods—one of the nation's most unusual serial killers. The case that rocked the Mormon Church.
Serious Noticing
The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book critic Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own. Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.
The Corporate Closet
With an expansion that provides a new section on resources and companies, James D. Woods reveals the trials and tribulations that gay men face in order to navigate, and even conceal, their sexuality in corporate life. While most believe that professional conduct is, or should be, separated from sexuality, corporate America is suffused with sexual assumptions. From its offices to its boardrooms, heterosexuality is continuously on display, from family photos to personnel policies that award health benefits to spouses and children, pressuring employees to align themselves with the “normal” expectations of being a corporate employee. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with men across the country in a variety of positions and companies, from chief executives to recent college graduates, James D. Woods shares the strategies that those different from the assumed role of being a corporate heterosexual, white man must use in order to survive the corporate world. By exploring the “sexual culture” of corporate organizations, Woods gives readers a glimpse into the lives of gay professionals and the difficult choices that they face daily.
Anecdotes of Enlightenment
"This volume is both a formal study of the anecdote's properties and possibilities and an inquiry into the anecdote's intellectual function in Enlightenment culture. The author contends that anecdotes acted in Enlightenment writing as mediators between the incidents of human life and the laws of human nature, connecting the abstractions of philosophical reflection with lived experience. Successive chapters take a specific genre (the essay), a single writer (David Hume), a historical event (the Endeavour voyage), and a literary project (the Lyrical Ballads) as nets for collecting anecdotes. Each chapter is committed to the particularities of individual anecdotes and the specificities of the uses to which these anecdotes were put. However, the book also outlines a larger historical narrative in which the anecdote moves from a central place in the science of human nature to holding a particular place in poetry, even as the anecdote began to lose its currency in the emerging human sciences"--
Asylum Doctor
This biography of an early twentieth-century South Carolina doctor sheds light on his pioneering work with the mentally ill to combat a public health scourge. Thousands of Americans died of pellagra before the cause—vitamin B3 deficiency—was identified. Credit for solving the mystery is usually given to Dr. Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service. But in Asylum Doctor, Charles S. Bryan demonstrates that a coalition of American asylum superintendents, local health officials, and practicing physicians set the stage for Golberger’s historic work—chief among them was Dr. James Woods Babcock. As superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane from 1891 to 1914...
The Broken Estate
In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers. Wood re-appraises the writing of such figures as Thomas More, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf, vigorously reading them against the grain of received opinion, and illuminatingly relating them to questions of religious and phiosophical belief. Contemporary writers, such as Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon and George Steiner, are also discussed, with the boldness and attention to language that have made Wood such an influential and controversial figure. Writing here about his own childhood struggle to believe, Wood says that 'the child of evangelism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference'. Wood brings that suspicion to bear on literature itself. The result is a unique book of criticism.
Beginner's Guide to Comic Art: Characters
Draw like a pro! Create fantastic, imaginative art for your comics with the comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Comic Art.
