James Wood: The Fun Stuff

James Wood’s essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker and The London Review of Books have established him as the leading popular literary critic of his generation. The Fun Stuff (Jonathan Cape) collects pieces written between 2004 and 2011 on canonical authors such as Hardy, Lermontov and Tolstoy, as well as on important contemporary writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis and Kazuo Ishiguro, and takes its title from an essay on the musician Keith Moon. James visited the shop to talk about his work, and to discuss life, literature, and the role of the critic.