James Wood’s The Broken Estate

In my previous posting on Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, I spoke, perhaps dramatically, of the battle for the soul of Western culture, one that has already long been lost in academia. University English departments have stripped literature of its special […]

James Wood’s How Fiction Works

In the tradition of Forster’s Aspects Of The Novel and Kundera’s The Art Of The Novel, Harvard professor and renowned literary critic James Wood has produced his own investigation into fiction’s inner workings, and though he cannot quite boast the firsthand experience of those […]

James Wood’s The Fun Stuff

In starting this blog, and in writing literary criticism more generally, I had in mind an ideal, a mode of writing to aspire to based on the critical writings that had given me the most pleasure. James Wood is that […]