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Cover image for The fun stuff, and other essays
Format:
Book
Title:
The fun stuff, and other essays
ISBN:
9780374159566
Edition:
1st ed.
Publication Information:
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Physical Description:
viii, 339 pages ; 22 cm
Contents:
The fun stuff : homage to Keith Moon -- W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz -- Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go -- Thinking: Norman Rush -- Cormac McCarthy's The road -- Edmund Wilson -- Aleksandar Hemon -- Beyond a boundary: Netherland as a postcolonial novel -- Wounder and wounded -- Robert Alter and the King James Bible -- Tolstoy's War and peace -- Marilynne Robinson -- Lydia Davis -- Containment: trauma and manipulation in Ian McEwan -- Richard Yates -- George Orwell's very English revolution -- Unfathomable!: (Mikhail Lermontov) -- Thomas Hardy -- Geoff Dyer -- Paul Auster's shallowness -- Reality examined to the point of madness: László Krasznahorkai -- Ismail Kadare -- English muddle: Alan Hollinghurst -- Life's white machine: Ben Lerner -- Packing my father-in-law's library.
Summary:
In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches--which range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov--literary critic James Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.
Holds: