The things closest to life

The Nearest Thing To Life

This personal work by James Wood, a leading contemporary literary critic and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a masterclass in memoir and criticism, fiction and life.
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In this masterful blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood delivers a masterclass in the connection between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction possesses a unique capacity to describe the shape of our lives, to rescue the very fabric of those lives from death and historical oblivion. Here, the act of reading is understood as the most sacred and personal of acts, with fascinating discussions of individual works—including Chekhov's short story "The Kiss," W. G. Sebald's "The Emigrant," and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Blue Flower." Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the coming-of-age of a boy from the countryside. The final section considers the novel in the context of exile and homelessness.
The Closest Thing to Life is not only a short, tightly argued book by one of our best living critics, but also a deeply moving personal narrative that reflects on and embodies the productive complicity between reader and author (and critic as well), and invites us to rethink everything that is central to how we read and write fiction.
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"These eloquently written words are both inspiring in their quiet refinement and revealing of Wood himself."
—Newsweek

“Wood’s mind is a vessel for collecting literary treasures, protecting them from the erosion of time. But the treasures Wood guards are more than aesthetic: books are safe-houses of human emotion, urns that hold words rather than ashes.”
—The Guardian

"Rich in language artistry...Wood displays a mastery of rhetoric and insight."
—Publishers Weekly

"Wood's new book offers characteristically perceptive readings of works by Penelope Fitzgerald, Chekhov, De Quincey, and others, while also offering grand insights into literary works... In this book, he reveals a more vulnerable and accessible version of himself, drawing on details from his childhood in England and his life with his father in Boston."
—The New York Times Book Review

2024-09-01

北京联合出版公司

New Thinking

147

9787559678454