From a Novel in Progress 
James Wood
I denied my father three times, but he only died once. The Obituaries Editor of the Times was responsible for my first denial. I was living in London with my wife, Jane Sheridan, and things were not going well. At University College, where I was teaching philosophy, I had become one of those figures whom students romanticise and sometimes pity. I didn’t have the proper qualifications, and the classes I gave were printed on the curriculum brochure in a different coloured ink from the main lectures. Insultingly, the university paid me by the hour! The faculty was beginning to look at me as if I were dead, the students as if I were somewhat grotesquely alive, but it amounted to the same thing.
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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.
Other articles by this contributor:
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
The Slightest Sardine · a literary dragnet
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
A Frog’s Life · Coetzee’s Confessions
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
Fundamentally Goyish · Zadie Smith
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