How Fiction Works and over 400,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
How Fiction Works
 
 
Start reading How Fiction Works on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

How Fiction Works (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: free indirect style, Henry James, Miss Brodie, Queen Victoria (more...)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)

List Price: $24.00
Price: $16.32 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $7.68 (32%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Temporarily out of stock.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Kindle Edition, July 22, 2008 $9.07   -- --
  Hardcover, July 21, 2008 $16.32   -- --
  Paperback, Deckle Edge $10.08   -- --
  MP3 CD, Unabridged $19.95   -- --
  Audio, Download Offsite Link $10.47 or less with new Audible membership

Frequently Bought Together

How Fiction Works + Aspects of the Novel + Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
Price For All Three: $35.75

Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Show details

  • This item: How Fiction Works by James Wood

    Temporarily out of stock.
    Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.) by Francine Prose

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Aspects of the Novel

Aspects of the Novel

by E. M. Forster
4.5 out of 5 stars (17)  $9.36
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel

The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel

by James Wood
4.3 out of 5 stars (6)  $13.68
The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by James Wood
4.2 out of 5 stars (13)  $16.24
The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts

The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts

by David Lodge
4.3 out of 5 stars (7)  $10.20
Aristotle's Poetics (Dramabook,)

Aristotle's Poetics (Dramabook,)

by Hippocrates George Apostle
4.6 out of 5 stars (10)  $8.91
Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: The first thing you'll notice about How Fiction Works is its size. At 252 pages, it's a marvel of economy for a book that asks such a huge question and right away you'll want to know (as you might at the start of a new novel) what the author has in store. James Wood takes only his own bookshelves as his literary terrain for this study, and that in itself is the most delightful gift: he joins his audience as a reader, citing his chosen texts judiciously--ranging from Henry James (from whom he takes the best epigraph to a book I've ever read) to Nabokov, Joyce, Updike, and more--to explore not just how fiction works, mechanically speaking, but to reflect on how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works ... or doesn't. Wood remarks that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it." His terrific bibliography will surely be a boon to anyone's education, but it's his masterful writing that you'll want to keep reading over the course of your life. --Anne Bartholomew

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer Aspects of the Novel in this eminently readable and thought-provoking treatise on the ways, whys and hows of writing and reading fiction. Wood addresses many of the usual suspects—plot, character, voice, metaphor—with a palpable passion (he denounces a verb as pompous and praises a passage from Sabbath's Theater as an amazingly blasphemous little mélange), and his inviting voice guides readers gently into a brief discourse on thisness and chosenness, leading up to passages on how to push out, the contagion of moralizing niceness and, most importantly, a new way to discuss characters. Wood dismisses Forster's notions of flat or round characters and suggests that characters be evaluated in terms of transparencies and opacities determined not by the reader's expectations of how a character may act (as in Forster's formula), but by a character's motivations. Wood, now at the New Yorker and arguably the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English letters, accomplishes his mission of asking a critic's questions and offer[ing] a writer's answers with panache. This book is destined to be marked up, dog-eared and cherished. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 22, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374173400
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374173401
  • Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #51,953 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category: (What's this?)

    #89 in  Books > Reference > Publishing & Books > Authorship

More About the Author

James Wood
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Visit Amazon's James Wood Page

Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
free indirect style
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Henry James, Miss Brodie, Queen Victoria, Lucas Lodge, Jane Austen, Henry Green, Kensal Green, David Copperfield, George Eliot, Ricardo Reis, Muriel Spark, Don Quixote, Clara Matilda, David Foster Wallace, William Gass, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Little Dog, Anna Karenina, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Lady Macbeth, Becky Sharp, Sir William, Uncle Charles
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

38 Reviews
5 star:
 (16)
4 star:
 (5)
3 star:
 (7)
2 star:
 (7)
1 star:
 (3)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (38 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
90 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Magician's Secrets, July 22, 2008
By Charlus "charlus" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage.

Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others.

One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches.

This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct.

My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers.

This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.


 
54 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Self-important and filled with jargon, January 28, 2009
Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the "popular," too much delight in his own prose ("Nearly all of Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved"), way too much jargon ("Characterological relativity"? Really?).

Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book two stars instead of one because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on "The Rise of Detail" was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.

But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow's description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. "And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence." (Yep, that's been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it-all of these things are ignored.

He's also a snob. He loathes something he calls "commercial realism," a style which "lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling," and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary-unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can't really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: "And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)

And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David "sees Bathsheba," Wood writes (on the way to analysing David's character as one who "sees, and acts...[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think"), "what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery."

"Cheerless psychologist," huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm.)

But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as "essentially juvenile" but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently "subtle analysis of character" is important, but he doesn't make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.


 
92 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars middlebrow, August 3, 2008
A disappointment. Based on a few print reviews I was expecting something really terrific, and there are four or five nicely turned passages here. But Mr. Wood has a terribly narrow sense of what makes fiction worthwhile, and seems to have no feeling at all for the pleasures of plot or the music of contemporary language. For him it all comes down to the gentlemanly delectation of "fine moments" in novels. One could forgive him this fussiness if it were done exceptionally well, but in fact this book is a kind of inflated pamphlet, with huge margins and large print, which simply strings together some ideas about narration and character. It is a real step down from a delightful book I first read at college in the 1960s and have returned to several times since: Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, which I'm happy to see is still in print. It is really scandalous that Mr. Wood didn't see fit to mention this forebear from which he borrows so much.

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Controversial but rewarding

When I read books on fiction, I'm usually left with the suspicion that the author is like an art critic who, if handed a paintbrush and pushed toward a blank canvass, would...
Published 18 days ago by C. Ackerman

3.0 out of 5 stars A Number of Shortcomings But Entertaining Enough
This book isn't a comprehensive, systematic treatise on fiction, despite the promise of the title and the almost obsessive organization of the contents into numerous chapters and...
Published 3 months ago by Chuck

4.0 out of 5 stars I don't want to know how the magician does his tricks
I have read this book in sections and I've enjoyed the discussions about books I've read very much. Mr.
Published 3 months ago by Susan K. Gushue

2.0 out of 5 stars Not as interesting as I had hoped
I picked up this book after hearing the author interviewed for a half hour on the radio. He had a wonderful conversational tone and had some interesting snippets to contribute...
Published 4 months ago by L. King

3.0 out of 5 stars Thisness and Lifeness
'How Fiction Works' is a reasoned approach, element by element, to Mr. Wood's ideas of *why* successful literature is effective.
Published 5 months ago by Bryan Byrd

5.0 out of 5 stars Blue Blue Blue
This is a nice read. Do I give it five stars because he says everything that needs to be said about fiction? No.
Published 5 months ago by S. kennedy

5.0 out of 5 stars It's The Truth, Not Realism, Stupid!
I read parts of this book aloud, it was so impressive. The author gave me more to think about in his short chapters than many a weighty writer's manual.
Published 7 months ago by Constant Weeder

2.0 out of 5 stars Wood Wind
Wood's appropriate put-down of Updike is balanced by his questionable praise of Roth, which is, I think, unduly concerted.
Published 8 months ago by Roy Arthur Swanson

2.0 out of 5 stars Plotting is Juvenile, apparently
I started reading "How Fiction Works" with high hopes, and I found James Wood's detailed arguments about detail, language and character very enlightening.
Published 8 months ago by Peter Fletcher

2.0 out of 5 stars Saving the meat for last (and such a small portion)
I have to chime in and agree with the reviews saying this book is rather slight; calling it a book is almost an act of nerve.
Published 10 months ago by John Grabowski

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
Why isn't this available for Kindle?! 1 January 2009
See all discussions...  
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
   




Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject