Short answers, pulled from the story.
James Douglas Graham Wood, born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, is an English literary critic, essayist, and novelist. He served as chief literary critic of The Guardian from 1991 to 1995, as a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007, and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.
Hysterical realism is a term Wood coined to describe contemporary big, ambitious novels characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. Wood argues these novels pursue vitality at all costs. Zadie Smith, whose novel White Teeth was cited in this context, called the term painfully accurate while disputing its broad application.
Wood argues that Flaubert decisively established modern realist narration, writing that novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring. In Wood's account, Flaubert was the first writer to combine all the key elements of realist prose: the telling and brilliant detail, visual noticing, unsentimental composure, neutral judgment, and pursuit of truth even at the cost of repelling the reader.
Wood attended Durham Chorister School on a music scholarship, then Eton College with the support of a bursary based on his parents' demonstrated financial need. He read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a First in 1988.
Bloom's opinion changed sharply over time. In 1999 he called Wood an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time, on the publication of The Broken Estate. By 2008, in a Vice magazine interview, Bloom said Wood simply does not exist and compared his work to period pieces that the wind will blow away.
Wood coined the term commercial realism to describe the style he identifies with Graham Greene, particularly Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. Wood defines it as attention to the minutiae of daily life, focusing on everyday elements that matter precisely because of their apparent lack of importance, capturing reality by depicting the banal alongside the interesting.