James Wood's The Fun Stuff confirms his preeminence not only as a discerning literary judge but as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate dispatcheswhich range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail LermontovWood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today. Also included are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming and Wood's essay on George Orwell, which was selected for the Best American Essays 2010.
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James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University (a part-time position) and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism.
Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs." Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
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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 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“: Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Ismail Kadare
English Muddle: Alan Hollinghurst
Life's White Machine: Ben Lerner
Packing My Father-in-Law's Library
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还好有威尔逊,纳博科夫才选择了《曼斯菲尔德庄园》和《荒原》两部作品在威尔斯利和康奈尔授课。
这一情节,对于那些像玛丽·麦卡锡那样,曾见证了威尔逊读到《沃洛佳》[1]时所散发出的喜悦的人来说 [1] 契诃夫的短篇小说。
这一段叙述虽然内容痛苦而深刻,但它给泽巴尔德的小说带来了某种破坏,我只在其精神方面表示赞同。
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