James Wood is the Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at the Department of English at Harvard University. He has written for the Guardian as chief literary critic and then The New Republic as a senior editor. He is a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker. An essayist as well, his nonfiction has been featured alongside his criticism in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. His published works include the books How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) and The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); as well as the novel, The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).