How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded

10th anniversary revised edition with new Introduction

James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction—an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power.

Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic?...