Serious Noticing
Selected Essays
- Published: 7 November 2019
- ISBN: 9781473571471
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 528
The two voices mingling in this collection give a beautiful, moving sense of the stakes of criticism as Wood has practiced it, vigorously, without interruption for 30 years... No modern critic has exerted comparable influence in how we read . . . Wood writes as if enmeshed in the text itself; registering shifts in point of view and perspective with seismographic precision
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review
In the unspooling sentences and paragraphs of the many fine and often seriously dandy essays that follow in this collection . . . Wood shows himself a maestro of tone and inflection. His sustained close attention as he interrogates the writers he loves is genuinely something to behold
Tim Adams, Observer
An authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time… Wood is always urgent, lucid, and interesting
Harold Bloom
Critics like James Wood not only help readers to read but especially, perhaps, help the author as well
Elena Ferrante
Deservedly famous for the intellectual dazzle, literary acuteness and moral seriousness of his essays on everything from the King James Bible to Don DeLillo ... Wood writes like a dream
Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Times Book Review
James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity… To enter Wood’s mind is to cross a threshold: from the reviewer commonplaces that pass for essay-writing into the intellectual daring that portends literary permanence
Cynthia Ozick
James Wood is a close reader of genius... By turns luscious and muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely considered
John Banville
James Wood is one of literature’s true lovers, and his deeply felt, contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral seriousness
Susan Sontag
James Wood, the critic, is one of the few living practitioners of his craft who will be read fifty years from now
Brian Morton, The Nation
Like all good critics, James Wood is a story-teller of the art of reading, recreating the experience on the page for us’
Francis Spufford
Packed with…insight… [and a] concern for the messiness of emotional truth… Over the years, as this volume demonstrates, Wood has learned not only to dissect that habit of mind, but also to practise it
Tim Adams, Observer
The most influential critic of his generation
William Skidelsky, New Statesman
The most urgent and morally demanding critic around
Guardian
Wood writes more incisively than almost anyone producing criticism today. His ability to transform complex, anxious thought into lucid, exciting prose is everywhere present
Janet Malcolm