Word: novels
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...boasts comfy tables and booths hidden among bookshelves, creating secluded spaces to wile away the hours. The diverse range of literature, which Paul describes as one "for real booklovers to come and discover," includes many works relating to India, where Paul grew up. Among them is Paul's own novel Cool Cut, which tells the story of three kite-flying friends in Chennai, delves into the politics of the Tamil community and examines the shadowy world of eunuchs. A second novel, set in Tibet, is with publishers...
...fiction works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 265 pages), James Wood tells a story from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, a novel that since its publication in 1932 has probably been read by only two people, namely James Wood and Joseph Roth. A military officer visits his servant, who is on his deathbed. When the officer enters, the old servant tries to click his heels together, even though he is under the covers and his feet are bare. It's a moment of deep, lancing pathos, when you seem to take in both characters' entire lives for an instant...
...pleasure of the book lies in watching Wood read. For Wood, the history of the novel is itself like a novel, in which genius-heroes perform astounding feats of literary innovation. Proust finds a new way to render character in Swann's Way ("Progress!" Wood shouts); Flaubert ("the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown") writes prose with a precision that until then had been reserved for poetry, and in the process inadvertently invents realism as we know it; Tolstoy narrates the fading consciousness inside a freshly severed head. Wood's enthusiasm is glorious. Reading alongside him is like going...
...point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood's theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, "The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." The novel is corrosive to systematic thought--whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they...
...lark, I forwarded the document to Amazon, which converts such things into Kindle-book format for free; minutes later, I had a lovely version on the device. And since I like to get something for nothing, I downloaded from other sites a dozen great, free novels, ranging from James Joyce's Ulysses to Cory Doctorow's recent sci-fi novel, Little Brother. The giveaways motivated me to meet the Kindle halfway by figuring out how it wanted to be used rather than how I had expected...