This should be nice encouragement for all those writers on strike.
Condalmo reminds us that the Tournament of Books is seeking recommendations for your favorite book of 2007.
James Wood is coming out with a book, "How Fiction Works" in February. (via Bookdwarf) Below is an excerpt from the Random House description, of which I can only comment that if most endings of novels disappoint, you’re reading the wrong novels:
In the tradition of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we ‘know’ a fictional character? What constitutes a ‘telling’ detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint?
