Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today I'm lucky to be

talking to James Wood. He is in an NPR studio in Boston. He is the author most recently of How Fiction Works, and I've been spending

two weeks or so reading his other books as well, The Broken Estate, the Irresponsible Self,

and his novel, The Book Against God. Having been the critic, the literary critic, the main literary critic for the New Republic,

he's been writing for the New Yorker now.

And it's easy to say that of the people who have a place in popular magazines, he is the best critic writing

in years.

In fact, his presence there is both a pleasure and a relief.

And how fiction works seems a special kind of book. It's a primer of sorts.

Who is it written for James? I think the easy answer is that it's written for the kind of person I was when I was about 20. It's exactly the kind of book when I was zealous with literary ambition, desperate to write my own fiction. That's another story. And, you know, full of plans and fantasies.

It was the kind of criticism that I was, that I was after, academic enough, but also

rightly enough to satisfy those kinds of yearnings.

So it's for would-be writers and readers?

I think so.

The other part of the readership would be, I suppose,

students of all ages.

I mean, in the past few years,

I've been teaching literature half-time at Harvard, so I have

...