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James Wood

  • Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books by John Carey

John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities. The enemy has stayed the same – roughly, overweening literary Modernism. Has Carey’s curious Oxonian populism truly changed, or just, as it were, moved colleges?

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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.