---
product_id: 103862043
title: "How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded"
brand: "james wood"
price: "154 zł"
currency: PLN
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.pl/products/103862043-how-fiction-works-tenth-anniversary-edition-updated-and-expanded
store_origin: PL
region: Poland
---

# How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded

**Brand:** james wood
**Price:** 154 zł
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded by james wood
- **How much does it cost?** 154 zł with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.pl](https://www.desertcart.pl/products/103862043-how-fiction-works-tenth-anniversary-edition-updated-and-expanded)

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- james wood enthusiasts

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## Description

How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded

## Images

![How Fiction Works: (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Updated and Expanded - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41xxyoFvuRL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Problem with authorial agency
  

*by Z***N on Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2023*

While for the most part this book shows a deft hand at introducing the craft of fiction—particularly what realism ushered in and made possible and even seem plausible—the feel of authorial agency rather than one dictated through narrative voice or language itself is highly annoying for one who understands subjectivity well. Also, the author treats technology as a piece of machinery rather than as techne which is critical to the novel itself. Possibly the most irritating section of the book was metaphor. While I highly enjoyed the reading of Roth’s paragraph, the rest of the metaphor section was like he was replaying the Flaubert’s desire to write nothing as to analyze nothing. Until nothing becomes an entry way to blow away how nothingness has sexualized women’s private areas that too much masculinity has to blow away. Thanks to Roth and Woods’ reading for that at least.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 3.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    It’s about how western fiction evolved, not about how it works.
  

*by L***A on Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2023*

This is erudite but not really useful as an aid to a new writer,

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    It makes me want to Barthes...
  

*by S***O on Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2013*

...sorry about that title, though having typed it, it causes me to think that James Wood would never come up with such word-play and good, I suppose, for him.He does take Barthes to serious task in quoting Barthes' 1966 observation that narrative represents nothing and that a novel is, in terms of narrative, "language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming."  Even if Barthes is wrong, he almost proves his point in writing so beautifully about language itself.Here's Wood himself, almost as good:  "I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level."  I'm not sure that "reality level" would be less clumsy if it were just "world," by maybe Wood is trying to caress, or castigate, some part of David Shields here.Wood is well read and reads well.  He's helped enormously by having a fine ear and eye for the fine analysis by others, from Virginia Woolf to Brigid Lowe (on the very notion of whether fiction is responsible for providing some kind of proof about the world).His own writing is never less than competent; even if he doesn't know where to put "only," as a modifier, as in "it only needs to ask the right questions," or hears a "hiss" in this (well, there is a hiss in "this" but not in this, which is what he quotes:  ""What, quite unmanned in folly?").He also quotes the same George Eliot words twice.  Nice words, but mostly a reminder that this book was no doubt put together from separate essays and neither Wood nor his editors read the book itself carefully enough to avoid such repetition (of this:  "Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.")."How Fiction Works" doesn't "read like a novel."  It's not supposed to.  But it's more involving than most fiction, which may not be saying much, but it's saying something.  Something that would be depressing if this book weren't so celebratory, in its way, of what is often good in our fiction and why fiction is important (the novel being "the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered," D. H. Lawrence, not quoted by Wood).

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*Product available on Desertcart Poland*
*Store origin: PL*
*Last updated: 2026-02-10*