Since the book you’ve just finished is a giant reading list, I thought it redundant to plaster the same names in my back pages. There are, however, some names and titles that bear further consideration—the theorists of and guides to this incredibly successful form. This little list barely scratches the surface of all the writing the form has inspired, but it’s a place to start. From there, you’re on your own. Happy reading.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981, written in the 1930s). Bakhtin has done more than any other critic to shape the vocabulary of narrative theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
John Barth, The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995). Barth doesn’t write fiction on Fridays. These essays, on a wide range of topics of interest to the novelist, are the work of that day. They’re clever, warm, enthusiastic, and very learned.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), The Pleasure of the Text (1972), Writing Degree Zero (1968). My favorite literary agent provocateur, Barthes is outrageous, interesting, impish, and wise, although not always at the same time. He loves to goad readers into responses. The Pleasure of the Text offers an “erotics of reading,” which is shocking, amusing, and brief. What more can you want in a critical text?
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1963). One of the great standard works on how fiction works, and the source of the notion of the “implied author.”
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (1988). Calvino’s provocative and engaging meditations on the stuff of fiction. His categories, with headings like “Lightness,” are brilliant and like no one else’s.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927). The source of the concept of round and flat characters, these were Forster’s Clark Lectures at Cambridge the year previous. Some great insights in audience-friendly language.
John Fowles, Wormholes (1998). An assemblage of Fowles’s essays, reviews, and occasional writings, this book is full of nuggets about his approach to fiction and about the craft more generally.
John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (1978), The Art of Fiction (1983), On Becoming a Novelist (1983). The combative first book got all the attention for its attacks on his contemporaries, but the second, his creative-writing text, and the third gave a broader understanding of the genre and great insights into the novelist’s craft.
William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word (1984). The first of these gives us the word “metafiction.” Gass is a philosopher of language and form as well as a fictionist in his own right, and his insights are both profound and closely argued.
Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884). One of the earliest serious considerations of the novel, and definitely the first in English to claim for the genre the status of art.
Jerome Klinkowitz, The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction (1984), The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present (1980). Klinkowitz is the only critic I know who also owns a baseball team, and his interests are similarly eclectic, although he’s best on postmodern experimentalism.
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992), The Practice of Writing (1997), Consciousness and the Novel (2003). Lodge is a novelist and academic of considerable accomplishment, and possibly our finest writer of academy novels. His Art of Fiction, fifty-two weekly installments written for newspaper publication, offers one of the best primers on fiction you’ll ever read.
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921). A follower of James, Lubbock wrote an early seminal text on the novel, as much for the opposition it inspired among the modernists as for its direct influence. A better defense of James than offered by the master himself.
Paris Review. Interviews since 1952, with Hemingway as the first writer interviewed by a very young George Plimpton. Tremendous insights on all aspects of the writing craft by poets, novelists, playwrights, and others. Many were collected over the years in the Writers at Work series; more recently, most of the interviews have been made available online.
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (2006). This one is good for readers, too. Prose covers a lot of technical ground while also offering a defense of her sort of highly engaged fiction.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Toward a New Novel) (1963). The Bible of the anti-novel by its leading practitioner. Traditionalists will find a lot to hate in this call for change.
Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (1967), revised and updated as Fabulation and Metafiction. He explores the wild invention and narrative shiftiness of novels after World War II, claiming for them that they subvert and expand traditional expectations about the form.
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (1966). One of the touchstones of narrative theory, exploring the constituent elements of fiction with some surprising observations, as for instance that the selectivity of the camera actually makes film more like narrative than drama. Very theoretical, but also highly approachable.
Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005). Smiley has written a wide array of novel types, and her consideration of the novel is similarly wide-ranging, from writing to the ways reading puts two minds in contact with each other.