Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

<p><b>The definitive collection of literary essays by <i>The New Yorker</i>’s award-winning longtime book critic</b><br><b></b><br>Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, <i>The Broken Estate</i>, 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.</p><p>Together, Wood’s essays, and his bestselling <i>How Fiction Works</i>, 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 <i>Serious Noticing</i>, Wood collects his best essays from two decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book <i>The Nearest Thing to Life</i> and recent essays from <i>The New Yorker</i> on young writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium.</p>