Wood's study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by the inarguable erudition displayed in his compact vade mecum of short chapters and neatly numbered sections devoted to such topics as point of view, characterization, fictional detail and, toward the end, nothing less than 'A Brief History of Consciousness.' He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed. Finally, to make himself even less intimidating, even more approachable, Wood (who writes these days for The New Yorker) has us know that every passage he cites in demonstration of his theories comes from 'the books at hand in my study' rather than, as the common reader might fear, the entire New York Public Library or, even more distressing, his memory. After noting his intellectual debts to 'the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky' and 'the French formalist-cumstructuralist Roland Barthes,' Wood goes on to compare his 'little volume' to the Victorian critic John Ruskin's musings on the Renaissance painter Tintoretto.

New York Times Review In the second of two short prefaces to 'How Fiction Works,' an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure 'the common reader' (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with all things cultural but is forever slightly short on time) that his prose is as free as he can make it of what James Joyce termed 'the true scholastic stink' of so much academic writing.

How Fiction Works by James Wood