Serious noticing : selected essays, 1997-2019 Cover Image

Book

Serious noticing : selected essays, 1997-2019 / James Wood.

Wood, James, 1965- (author.). McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-2023 Road (Added Author). Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910 Anna Karenina. (Added Author).

Record details

ISBN: 9780374261160
ISBN: 0374261164
Physical Description: vi, 510 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First American edition.
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
Copyright: ©2019

Content descriptions

General Note:

Originally published in 2019 by Vintage, Great Britain, as Serious noticing: selected essays.

"These essays originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, and The New Republic"--Title page verso.

Formatted Contents Note:

Fun stuff: homage to Keith Moon -- What Chekhov meant by life -- Serious noticing -- Saul Bellow's comic style -- Anna Karenina and characterization -- 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 -- 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 -- 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.