James Wood Rocks

He's the most intelligent critic working today. His collection of essays and reviews, The Broken Estate, completely changed my way of reading, and thinking about - and also writing - fiction. Unlike many critics, he doesn't see narrative realism as a dirty word, but as a complex, mysterious accomplishment - as a kind of magic, almost. He writes brilliantly on Austen, Gogol, Flaubert and Sebald in particular in that collection, and the introductory essay, "The Limits of Not Quite" is one of the most memorable and jolting pieces about literature I've ever read. And this week it has been announced that Wood is leaving the New Republic to become a staff writer at the New Yorker, which means (hopefully) he'll be writing much longer essays on literature, more frequently. This is good news.

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