Realistic fiction is really a sleight-of-hand. Too often, discovering the prosaic artifice behind a magic trick ruins one's pleasure in the show. Yet James Wood's enchanting new book, "How Fiction Works", analyses how novelists pull rabbits from hats-and he still makes the feat seem like magic. An esteemed British critic who now teaches at Harvard University and writes for the New Yorker, Mr Wood has put together a deft, slender volume about literary technique, his playful exuberance wonderfully at odds with the dry, jargon-strewn tradition of academic criticism. Mr Wood makes no claim to be thorough; he has restricted himself to citations available in his personal library.
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