Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker's award-winning longtime book critic

Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive literary style all their own.

Together, Wood's essays, and his bestselling How Fiction Works, share an abiding preoccupation with how fiction tells its own truths, and with the vocation of the writer in a world haunted by the absence of God. In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 01/14/2020
ISBN: 9780374261160
Pages: 528
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.60w x 1.60d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2020
Library Journal 01/24/2020 pg. 1