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Wednesday, July 23, 2008
James Woods on Fiction
Rohan Maitzen posted on James Woods, How Fiction Works, at Novel Readings on 12 March, and at The Valve on 27 March. Now Salon, Slate, and The New Republic (Frank Kermode) have decided to follow.
Comments
Thanks for pointing this out, Bill! Clearly, there are leaders and there are followers....Only half facetiously, I’d add that blogging makes it possible.
The conclusion to Walter Kirn’s review in the New York Times Book Review:
For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona. “How Fiction Works” is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors’ biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we’ll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise. But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap.