The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British academic and novelist David Lodge.

Lodge focuses each chapter upon one aspect of the art of fiction, comprising some fifty topics pertaining to novels or short stories by English and American writers.

Every chapter also begins with a passage from classic or modern literature that Lodge feels embodies the technique or topic at hand.

Some of the topics Lodge analyzes are Beginning (the first chapter), The Intrusive Author, The Epistolary Novel, Magic realism, Irony, symbolism, and Metafiction.

Among the authors he quotes in order to illustrate his points are Jane Austen, J. D. Salinger, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even himself.