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James Wood was born in 1965, in Durham, where he received a musical and religious education, as a chorister in that city's cathedral. He has been a literary journalist since leaving Jesus College, Cambridge, first at the Guardian, and presently at the New Republic. His essays have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in most major newspapers and journals.
Literary journalist Wood engages movingly, at the deepest level (consistent with the importance he attaches to issues of religious faith), with whatever he reads, as shown by this stimulating collection of 21 miscellaneous essays. Hearts stir as he impeaches the likes of Gustav Flaubert, Thomas Pynchon, George Steiner (you may balk at reading a critic on a critic, but this is a marvellously irreverent dressing-down), John Updike, Toni Morrison and Julian Barnes for high crimes and misdemeanours that should have been obvious to us all along. Yet Wood can be illuminatingly positive, on both established geniuses (Chekhov, Woolf, D H Lawrence) and major living writers (Philip Roth, W G Sebald), using simile, metaphor and aphorism as tools of finely tuned argument: 'Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his hat and gloves.' We must be grateful for critics who write with such panache. (Kirkus UK)
