Notes in the Margin Weblog

From the always-eager-to-sell-you-a-book folks at Amazon comes this notification:

As someone who has purchased Harry Potter products from Amazon.com, you might be happy to hear that The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling’s book of fairy tales written to supplement the Harry Potter series, will be published in two new editions on December 4, 2008.

Now, as a full-time student, I’ve been buried under mounds of textbooks for the past three years, and I was completely unaware of this literary gem. Apparently Rowling penned it and then auctioned it off, with the proceeds going to a children’s charity. You can read all about it at the Amazon page:

Amazon.com: The Fairy Tales of J.K. Rowling

Be sure to scroll all the way down the page to look at the photographs, which include some of Rowling’s hand-drawn illustrations. And, if you really have some time on your hands, follow the links to the comments at the bottom of the page.

“How Fiction Works” | csmonitor.com:

Matt Shaer reviews the recently published book How Fiction Works by James Wood: “Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former chief literary critic at the Guardian and The New Republic, is often called America’s preeminent literary critic.”

And, Shaer reports, that for the most part, Wood succeeds.

Drawing on his own vast fund of reading, Wood seeks out those moments when novelists come closest to achieving “lifeness” – or at least “the nearest thing to life” – in their art. One of the great pleasures in reading “How Fiction Works” comes from savoring the carefully selected passages that Wood chooses to illustrate his points.

How Fiction Works is, Shaer says, mainly an academic text that requires a familiarity with the major Western texts, including works by writers such as Henry James, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dafoe, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov. Wood uses passages from these writers to illustrate his points about “the basic building blocks of the novel: narration, detail, character, metaphor, and style.” But the emphasis is on characterization:

What really fascinates Wood – and what makes the book hum – is the messy business of characterization: the “thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.”

I’m still waiting for my pre-ordered copy of Wood’s book to arrive from Amazon. This review has piqued my impatience.

The school I attend has an unusual academic schedule. We have the months of February and August off, which means that July has been a manic month of reading and writing papers for me, with no time for updating this blog. But I’m back now, and looking to make up for lost time!

Thanks for your patience and understanding. And thanks to those of you who have posted comments so far.