Good Fiction Guide

by Jane Rogers (Editor)

Covering everyone from Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain to Don De Lillo and Lorrie Moore, Good Fiction Guide offers an informative reference work on novelists and their works, with an emphasis of twentieth-century fiction and popular classics, but with ample coverage of major novelists of the past.
The guide takes us on a stimulating tour of the literary landscape. Here are more than one thousand alphabetically arranged biographies of important novelists, ranging from Chinua Achebe to Emile Zola. There are profiles of leading contemporary writers, such as Ann Beattie, Thomas Pynchon,
Jane Smiley, Martin Amis, Amy Tan, Peter Carey, V.S. Naipaul, and Harold Brodkey. The entries provide a flavor of each writer's work, recommend which of their books to read, and include suggestions for related reading, leading you to other writers whose work may be either comparable or an
interesting contrast. Equally important, the guide includes 34 essays that illuminate genres such as Crime, Adventure, Romance, and Magic Realism, or offer intriguing looks at the national literatures of such places as Australia, India, and the Caribbean. Each entry is a personal essay by an expert
in the field and includes their top twelve recommended titles.
Good Fiction Guide is a perfect road map for everyone exploring the highways and byways of fiction.

Genres: Reference, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Literary Criticism

512 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2001

About the author

Jane Rogers is an award winning author of nine novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012.

Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised for the BAFTA-nominated BBC drama series), Her Living Image (Somerset Maugham Award) and Promised Lands (Writers Guild Best Fiction Award). Her story collection Hitting Trees with Sticks was shortlisted for the 2013 Edgehill Award, and the title story was a BBC National Short story award winner.

Jane is Emerita Professor of Writing and also writes radio dramas and adaptations. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in Banbury, UK.

www.janerogers.info

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Fiction Guide was enchanting, I have to state that assuredly. It contains lists of the best of a genre, and it's usually an english trained genre, but nevertheless, great selections. I wouldn't of had the courage to seek out the books I read about in there without the help of a selected essay on each genre. Really spiffy!

[Doug Geivett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book to be read through so much as a book to be consulted when compiling a list of want-to-read books. Book descriptions help without spilling the beans. I come back to this book periodically for reminders, as I do a few other books about books.

[Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

As both a very heavy reader of broad tastes and interests, and a librarian (i.e., a professional recommender of books), I’m always on the look-out for new lists of other people’s reading recommendations. This one runs to nearly 500 pages, most of it in the form of brief, individually authored articles (from less than half a column in length to nearly a whole page for people like F. Scott Fitzgerald) on writers who mostly have been originally published in English, ranging from Defoe and Dickens and Henry Fielding to Patricia Cornwell and Neal Stephenson and Bridget Fielding. There are also nearly three dozen topical essays -- Canada, Fantasy, Film Adaptations, The Sea, Teen, etc -- which I frankly found too idiosyncratic to be of much use.

It took me several weeks to work my way slowly through this thing, notepad at hand to jot down authors and titles that were new to me, or which the reviewer convinced me I ought to reconsider. I filled more than a dozen pages, which means I can happily push this volume on other dedicated readers.

Not that I don’t have some caveats. No such book can be all-inclusive, of course, so I won’t complain about the (in my opinion) excellent authors who were omitted. Though I’m annoyed that a relatively minor science fiction author from the ‘50s like John Wyndham is discussed, but not the innovative John Varley. On the other hand, can you even begin to talk about Robert Coover without mentioning his most widely-read novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.? Or Stephen King with no mention of The Stand, which is as close as he has yet come to a magnum opus? There seems also to be a heavy emphasis on British writers, with many minor names being included out of proportion to less-known U.S. authors; this bias is not noted in the Introduction, but becomes obvious as you browse. Well, an editor’s lot is never an easy one. But they really should have included a title index.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't really READ this, per say. It's more of a reference book. But I love it so much I have to note so.