Tag: James Wood
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Jon McGregor’s Pagan Omniscience
I’ve spent part of this year reading through the work of Jon McGregor, whose latest novel, Reservoir 13, has met with a lot of acclaim here in Britain. It has even become one of those rare beasts longlisted or shortlisted for the more conservative literary prizes (the Booker, the Costa) as well as the Goldsmiths Prize…
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Why a Novel?
Who knows what to make of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Go, Went, Gone? James Wood has written a deeply appreciative review in the New Yorker, calling the novel “magnificent” and counting “among its many virtues” the fact that “it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false…
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An Exemplary Intensity
A review of Daniel Green’s collection of literary criticism and metacriticism, Beyond the Blurb.
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Meaning Against the Meaningless
An attempt to understand Karl Ove Knausgaard’s creative decisions, and their intended effects, in the My Struggle series.
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The Aesthetics of a Congealing Artform
In the latest New Yorker, James Wood challenges David Shields on some of his assumptions about the tension between authorial intentions and the representation of reality in fiction: Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? … Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity…
Infinite Patience 