What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

This short book is a work of one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers and historians of philosophy, Etienne Gilson. The book's title, taken from the first chapter, may sound esoteric but it reflects a common-sense outlook on the world, applied in a methodical way. That approach, known as realism, consists in emphasizing the fact that what is real precedes our concepts about it. In contrast to realism stands idealism, which refers to the philosophical outlook that begins with ideas and tries to move from them to things. Gilson shows how the common-sense notion of realism, though denied by many thinkers, is indispensible for a correct understanding of things--of what is and how we know what is. He shows the flaws of idealism and he critiques efforts to introduce elements of idealism into realist philosophy (immediate realism). At the same time, the author criticizes failures of certain realist philosophers--including Aristotle--to be consistent in their own principles and to begin from sound starting points. To these problems, Gilson traces medieval philosophy's failure in the realm of science, which led early modern scientific thinkers of the 17th century unnecessarily to reject even the best of medieval scholastic philosophy. He concludes with The Realist Beginner's Handbook, a summary of key points for thinking clearly about reality and about the knowledge of it.

The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?

A critical study which discusses passion and community as the central structures of feeling in tragic realism, tracing their origins in Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and explaining their contemporary eclipse in Western society.

What is science? -- Scientific inference -- Explanation in science -- Realism and anti-realism -- Scientific change and scientific revolutions -- Philosophical problems in physics, biology, and psychology -- Science and its critics.