James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. He is also the author of a novels Upstate and The Book Against God and a study of technique in the novel called, How Fiction Works. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices