A New Yorker critic explores the raw power of literature
Non-fiction: The Nearest Thing to Life. By James Wood. Jonathan Cape, €17.50.
The influential literary critic James Wood was on the course of his career path long before his New Yorker days. The book that had “the profoundest effect” on the Durham schoolboy was a second-hand copy of Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction by the poet Martin Seymour-Smith, which offered profiles and rankings of 1,348 authors and their works.
“I used the alphabetical list ...
