James Wood is the most consequential book critic writing in English, and the one novelists most dread. He built his reputation at The Guardian and The New Republic before joining The New Yorker in 2007, and his standard is consistent to the point of being a doctrine: fiction earns its keep through the accurate registration of consciousness, and everything else is decoration. How Fiction Works (2008) makes the case in miniature, walking through free indirect style, detail, character and dialogue with an examiner's patience. The Broken Estate (1999) traced the exchange of religious belief for the belief we extend to novels. The Fun Stuff (2012) and The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) collect the essays and the argument's most personal statement. He coined "hysterical realism" in a review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, describing novels that pile up plot and coincidence in place of human beings — a phrase that stuck to DeLillo, Pynchon, Rushdie and Wallace, and provoked years of rebuttal. Wood teaches at Harvard and has published two novels of his own.