In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches--which range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov--literary critic James Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.

The fun stuff : homage to Keith Moon W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go Thinking: Norman Rush Cormac McCarthy's The road Edmund Wilson Aleksandar Hemon Beyond a boundary: Netherland as a postcolonial novel Wounder and wounded Robert Alter and the King James Bible Tolstoy's War and peace Marilynne Robinson Lydia Davis

Containment: trauma and manipulation in Ian McEwan Richard Yates George Orwell's very English revolution Unfathomable!: (Mikhail Lermantov) Thomas Hardy Geoff Dyer Paul Auster's shallowness Reality examined to the point of madness: László Krasznahorkai Ismail Kadare English muddle: Alan Hollinghurst Life's white machine: Ben Lerner Packing my father-in-law's library.