James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and the author of the national bestseller How Fiction Works and the novel The Book Against God. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“One of the great, abiding works of English literature . . . The acute poetry, balanced sonorities, heavy order, and direct intimacy of its prose have achieved permanence, and many of its phrases and sentences are as famous as lines from Shakespeare or the King James Bible.” —James Wood, from the Introduction