Book review: “How Fiction Works” by James Wood
(1) Twice in his preface to How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In the first instance, Wood, citing Virginia Woolf, notes that the creation of [...]
(1) Twice in his preface to How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In the first instance, Wood, citing Virginia Woolf, notes that the creation of [...]
More than 1,600 years ago, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, wrote his Confessions, and it’s been a book with staying power. Indeed, as measured by its friends and enemies, the book [...]
Augustine of Hippo, the hugely influential philosopher and theologian of the late 400s and early 500s, was, according to Garry Wills, “a tireless seeker, never satisfied.” In Saint Augustine, his [...]
There are several running gags that Elmore Leonard has woven through his 2004 novel Mr. Paradise, one of them having to do with the dismemberment of the body of one [...]
I suspect that Joseph Conrad’s short 1917 novel The Shadow-Line, a Confession would have a difficult time finding a publisher today. Let me amend that: Yes, the head of some [...]
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It’s been fifty years since Robert E. Toomey, Jr., published his first novel A World of Trouble in 1973. It was also his last. As I read the sci-fi adventure, [...]
Out of Cabrini is a crackerjack police novel that rises above its genre with a subtly nuanced and very human story of crime and punishment from the perspective of cops, [...]
There is no getting around it. William Kent Krueger’s 2013 novel Ordinary Grace has been a huge bestseller for a decade. Not only that, but it’s been honored as a [...]