13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Read an Excerpt

Part One
The end of September is a great time to have a birthday if you want to be a writer. Jane Austen might be December 16 and Shakespeare April 23 and Charles Dickens February 9, but for a sheer run of greatness, I challenge anyone to match September 23

Part Two
But I had penned a concise biography of Charles Dickens, and maybe I had learned from Dickens's life an unwanted lesson. I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book, it seemed to me

Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling novelist Jane Smiley celebrates the novel - and takes us on an exhilarating tour through one hundred of them - in this seductive and immensely rewarding literary tribute.

In her inimitable style - exuberant, candid, opinionated - Smiley explores the power of the novel, looking at its history and variety, its cultural impact, and just how it works its magic. She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels - from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro - she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.

Jane Smiley is the author of eleven novels as well as three works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in Northern California..

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