Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them - Hardcover

Prose, Francine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060777044 ISBN 13: 9780060777043

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2006

Synopsis

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

About this title

Review:

"The passages are.subtle and brilliant in their capture of human complexity.Prose is.a skilled.analyst of what makes them so." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"a jewel of a companion.engrossing...and...daringly insightful." -- Los Angeles Times

"Witty...Insightful." -- Washington Post Book World

"Makes a case for the rewards of reading." -- Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel

"Readable and illuminating.few.advice volumes offer as much insight into writing as you will find in Francine Prose's latest book" -- Capital Times

"Prose knows when to be funny, how to wield examples, and when to stop."--More magazine

"Prose's little guide will motivate 'people who love books'...Like the great works of fiction, it's a wise and voluble companion."--New York Times Book Review

"The passages are...subtle and brilliant in their capture of human complexity...Prose is...a skilled...analyst of what makes them so."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Readable and illuminating...few...advice volumes offer as much insight into writing as you will find in Francine Prose's latest book"--Capital Times

"Witty...Insightful."--Washington Post Book World

About the Author:

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060777044
• ISBN 13: 9780060777043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 273