The art of fiction: Illustrated from classic and modern texts - Hardcover

David Lodge has published nine novels, including the award-winning Changing Places, How Far Can You Go?, Small World and Nice Work. His most recent novel is Paradise News (1991). He has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was Chairman of the judges of that prize in 1989. He is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 to 1987, and still lives in that city. He is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Language of Fiction, The Novelist at the Crossroads, The Modes of Modern Writing, Working with Structuralism and After Bakhtin, and has edited several anthologies of criticism and classic novels. A volume of David Lodge's occasional essays, Write On, was published by Secker & Warburg in 1986, and the text of his first stage play, The Writing Game, in 1991.

British novelist Lodge ( Paradise News ) retired in 1987 from Birmingham University's English faculty and swore off academic prose, but in 1991 he consented to contribute a series of columns "of interest to a more general reading public" to the London Independent . Each of these 50 essays begins with a brief fiction passage, addressed and interpreted topically by Lodge, who discusses point of view, the unreliable narrator, "the uncanny," "weather" and other aspects of writing. For example, in Chapter 19, "Repetition," he observes that while Hemingway is famous for the "charged simplicity" of his reiterated words or phrases, repetition brings a special flavor to the work of writers as various as Dickens, Lawrence and Martin Amis--and he proves it. The selections are varied, although perhaps slanted to favor gentility (Austen and Nabokov, not Meredith or Dreiser), and tend to verify the opinion that "the novel has always been centrally concerned with erotic attraction and desire." Lodge may be working a bit below full capacity here, but apart from serving as a genial companion, he defines terms of the novelist's craft so deftly and concisely that this pleasurable browse could rescue (or replace) many a college syllabus.
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