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Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374173401
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374173401
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429908653
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: 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 some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh? James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446414485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
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 the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions. Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page. 'Should find a place on every novel-lover's shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it' Financial Times
Author: Margot Singer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033586X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
In settings from Jerusalem to Manhattan, from the archaeological ruins of the Galilee to Kathmandu, The Pale of Settlement gives us characters who struggle to piece together the history and myths of their family’s past. This collection of linked short stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life. In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother—a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust—with the story of her own affair with a married man and an invented narrative of her grandmother’s life. In “Borderland,” while trekking in Nepal, Susan meets an Israeli soldier who carries with him the terrible burden of his experience as a border guard in the Gaza Strip. And in the haunting title story, bedtime tales are set against acts of terrorism and memories of a love beyond reach. The stories of The Pale of Settlement explore the borderland between Israelis and American Jews, emigrants and expatriates, and vanished homelands and the dangerous world in which we live today.
Author: Oakley Hall
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
ISBN: 9781582972930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Think of your fiction like a clock, a marvel of mainsprings and wheels, pinions and pendulums. It's an extraordinary organization of diverse elements, channeling energy and tension into the regular coordination of action and reaction, rotating gears and moving hands. &break;&break;Oakley Hall, writing teacher emeritus, invites you as his apprentice to study fiction's inner workings, the pegs and screws upon which a good story depends. You'll find the elements of fiction examined and illuminated, with insights into how they must interact to create a distinctive story. &break;&break;In sharing lessons taught by years of experience and by citing examples from dozens of esteemed writers, Hall makes working alongside a master thoroughly pleasurable, as well as an invaluable opportunity to craft fiction that is tuned like a precision timepiece.
Author: Laura Hapke
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820319087
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Daughters of the Great Depression is a reinterpretation of more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of Depression-era fiction that illuminate one of the decade's central conflicts: whether to include women in the hard-pressed workforce or relegate them to a literal or figurative home sphere. Laura Hapke argues that working women, from industrial wage earners to business professionals, were the literary and cultural scapegoats of the 1930s. In locating these key texts in the "don't steal a job from a man" furor of the time, she draws on a wealth of material not usually considered by literary scholars, including articles on gender and the job controversy; Labor Department Women's Bureau statistics; "true romance" stories and "fallen woman" films; studies of African American women's wage earning; and Fortune magazine pronouncements on white-collar womanhood. A valuable revisionist study, Daughters of the Great Depression shows how fiction's working heroines--so often cast as earth mothers, flawed mothers, lesser comrades, harlots, martyrs, love slaves, and manly or apologetic professionals--joined their real-life counterparts to negotiate the misogynistic labor climate of the 1930s.
Author: Douglas Bauer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472031535
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
A master storyteller and teacher talks about the tools of the fiction writer's craft
Author: Timothy O'Leary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441156941
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Foucault and Fiction develops a unique approach to thinking about the power of literature by drawing upon the often neglected concept of experience in Foucault's work. For Foucault, an 'experience book' is a book which transforms our experience by acting on us in a direct and unsettling way. Timothy O'Leary develops and applies this concept to literary texts. Starting from the premise that works of literature are capable of having a profound effect on their audiences, he suggests a way of understanding how these effects are produced. Offering extended analyses of Irish writers such as Swift, Joyce, Beckett, Friel and Heaney, O'Leary draws on Foucault's concept of experience as well as the work of Dewey, Gadamer, and Deleuze and Guattari. Combining these resources, he proposes a new approach to the ethics of literature. Of interest to readers in both philosophy and literary studies, this book offers new insights into Foucault's mature philosophy and an improved understanding of what it is to read and be affected by a work of fiction.
Author: Guillermo Erades
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478376
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
"Martin came to Moscow at the turn of the millennium hoping to discover the country of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and his beloved Chekhov. Instead he found a city turned on its head, where the grimmest vestiges of Soviet life exist side by side with the nonstop hedonism of the newly rich. Along with his hard-living expat friends, Martin spends less and less time on his studies, choosing to learn about the Mysterious Russian Soul from the city's unhinged nightlife scene"--
Author: Catharine Abell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192567268
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
By taking a distinctively institutional approach, Catharine Abell provides a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. In particular, she draws attention to the epistemology of fiction, which has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, yet few attempts have been made to explain how audiences identify their contents, or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of them. This book answers both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relation between them: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction? What is the nature of fictive utterances? How do audiences identify the contents of authors' fictive utterances? How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it? This book develops the first single theory to provide answers to these questions and many more.
