Über den Autor
Michael Wood
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction
Maps of Fiction
The Kindness of Novels (Ronald Barthes)
The Comedy of Ignorance (Samuel Beckett)
Politics in Paradise (Julio Cortazar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas)
The Motive for Metaphor (Milan Kundera)
The Promised Land (Italo Calvino)
Other Times
A Postmodernist Romance (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
The Mind Has Mountains (Toni Morrison)
Tigers and Mirrors (Angela Carter)
All the rage (Stephen King)
Stories and Silences
Lost Paradises (Edward Said)
The Discourse of Others (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Nightmare of Narrative (Jeanette Winterson)
Klappentext
An engaging series of reflections on the literary landscape of our time -- from the writings of Roland Barthes to those of Stephen King -- Wood explores such issues as the shift of interest from novel to story, the blurring of the line between fiction and criticism, the persistence of the notion of paradise, the lure of horror, and the tendency of fiction both to reflect and to resist contemporary history. Wood casts his net wide: a brilliant dissection of Beckett's prose comedy is followed by an absorbing sequence of essays on Kundera, Calvino and García Márquez. Chapters on Toni Morrison and on Angela Carter lead us to chapters on Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.
There is no better guide to the contemporary literary traveler than Children of Silence. Michael Wood knows novels, and he teases out of great books, mediocre books, and books of criticism conundrums that are enormously challenging, entertaining, and enlightening. There are plenty of books on contemporary or postmodern fiction but nothing like this one because no other critic can write like this--with this range over different literatures and languages, and with this unflagging sharpness of mind. -- Louis Menand
