Introducing ‘Who’s afraid of realism?’

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood looks at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike.

James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’.

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Books featured in the series:

Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library)

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics)

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton)

Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics)

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage)

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad)

Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics)

Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)