What do we mean when we say we “know” a fictional character? When is a metaphor successful? In this updated and expanded edition of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, the book critic and author addresses various techniques of storytelling and offers a study of the magic of fiction. Through chapter titles such as Narrating, Character, Form, Dialogue, and Sympathy and Complexity, Wood discusses the techniques of fiction as well as offers a history of the novel form. “When this book was first published in 2008, it was sometimes seen as a defense of classic realism,” writes Wood in the preface to this tenth anniversary edition. “I hope this revised version makes clearer, ten years later, that on the contrary, I’m wary of conventional realism but drawn to a kind of deep realism, which I do believe runs through the novelistic tradition. Far from wanting to defend realism—and anyway, it needs no defense—I want to interrogate it.”
