The Fun Stuff
And Other Essays
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—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, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of 23 essays gathered from the New Republic, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker offers the latest proof that Wood (How Fiction Works) is one of the best readers writing today. Devouring these pieces back to back feels like having a long conversation about books with your most erudite, articulate, and excitable friend. To read his essays on the works of Norman Rush, Aleksandar Hemon, Leo Tolstoy, or Lydia Davis is to relive the specific brand of joy created by a particular work of genius. Wood's reviews are never just evaluations; more often they are passionate, sensitive discourses on the variations of authorial voice, the nature of memory, or the burden of biography. Wood's critical writing on Cormac McCarthy, Joseph O'Neill, and Thomas Hardy is bookended by two moving personal essays. In the National Magazine Award nominated riff "The Fun Stuff," Wood exalts the skills of Keith Moon, writing that the drummer's "playing is like an ideal sentence of prose... a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong." Wood's veneration of virtuosity reminds why we're reading at all because we still believe that it's possible to find transcendence in great art. Isn't it fun to think so?
