How Fiction Works
by James Wood · Picador
James Wood analyzes short passages from Flaubert through Roth to explain narration, free indirect style, detail, character, dialogue and realism. Readers finish able to name the technical choices producing prose effects they previously only sensed, and to quote evidence for them. This is the standard modern text for close reading prose, and it teaches transferable mental models (free indirect style, the status of detail, the mechanics of point of view) rather than a checklist.
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