Serious noticing : selected essays, 1997-2019 / James Wood.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020Copyright date: ©2019Edition: First American editionDescription: vi, 510 pages ; 22 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780374261160
- 0374261164
- Essays. Selections
- McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- Road
- Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910. Anna Karenina
- Austen, Jane, 1775-1817
- Auster, Paul, 1947-
- Bellow, Saul
- Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881
- Erpenbeck, Jenny, 1967-
- Ferrante, Elena
- Garner, Helen, 1942-
- Hrabal, Bohumil, 1914-1997
- Kadare, Ismail
- Krasznahorkai, László
- Levi, Primo
- Moon, Keith, 1946-1978
- Orwell, George, 1903-1950
- Quixote, Don (Fictitious character)
- Robinson, Marilynne
- Roth, Joseph, 1894-1939
- Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001
- Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941
- English essays -- 20th century
- English essays -- 21st century
- Literature -- History and criticism
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 824.92 W876 | Available | 33111009628864 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker 's award-winning longtime book critic
Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate , in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own.
Together, Wood's essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works , share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing , Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.
Originally published in 2019 by Vintage, Great Britain, as Serious noticing: selected essays.
"These essays originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, and The New Republic"--Title page verso.
Fun stuff: homage to Keith Moon -- What Chekhov meant by life -- Serious noticing -- Saul Bellow's comic style -- Anna Karenina and characterization -- Joseph Roth's empire of signs -- Paul Auster's shallowness -- Hysterical realism -- Bohumil Hrabal's comic world -- George Orwell's very English revolution -- Jane Austen's heroic consciousness -- Cormac McCarthy's the road -- Reality examined to the point of madness': László Krasznahorkai -- Wounder and wounded -- On not going home -- Other side of silence: rereading W. G. Sebald -- Becoming them -- Don Quixote's old and new testaments -- Dostoevsky's god -- Helen Garner's savage honesty -- All and the if: God and metaphor in Melville -- Elena Ferrante -- Virginia Woolf's Mysticism -- Job existed: Primo Levi -- Marilynne Robinson -- Ismail Kadare -- Jenny Erpenbeck -- Packing my father-in-law's library.