Serious Noticing

Selected Essays, 1997–2019

James Wood

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780374722043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

From The New Yorker's book critic, "one of the most intelligent and passionate literary critics working today. . . . a masterful 'greatest hits' collection" (Angela M. Giles,  Los Angeles Review of Books ).
Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate 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.

 "Forensically close readings of the text, pointing out fiction's innovations and revolutions?the "failed privacies" of Chekhov's characters, the "unwrapped" consciousness in Virginia Woolf's novels. . . . a beautiful, moving sense of the stakes of criticism as Wood has practiced it." ?Parul Sehgal,  The New York Times Book Review
"[Food] has a notable capacity for articulate enthusiasm and a withering tongue to balance it." —Francis Mulhern,  New Left Review
"Thick with images you can almost reach out and grasp . . . With criticism like this, who needs fiction?" ?Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Introduction
• The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon
• What Chekhov Meant by Life
• Serious Noticing
• Saul Bellow’s Comic Style
• Anna Karenina and Characterisation
• Joseph Roth’s Empire of Signs
• Paul Auster’s Shallowness
• Hysterical Realism
• Bohumil Hrabal’s Comic World
• George Orwell’s Very English Revolution
• Jane Austen’s Heroic Consciousness
• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
• ‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai
• Wounder and Wounded
• On Not Going Home
• The Other Side of Silence: Rereading W. G. Sebald
• Becoming Them
• Don Quixote’s Old and New Testaments
• Dostoevsky’s God
• Helen Garner’s Savage Honesty
• The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville
• Elena Ferrante
• Virginia Woolf’s Mysticism
• Job Existed: Primo Levi
• Marilynne Robinson
• Ismail Kadare
• Jenny Erpenbeck
• Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Also by James Wood
• Praise for James Wood
• A Note About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright