Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas - Softcover

Prose, Francine

3.54

330 ratings by Goodreads

9780805055863: Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080505586X ISBN 13: 9780805055863

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1998

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Two novellas--"Guided Tours of Hell" and "Three Pigs in Five Days"--examine the difficulty of feeling the appropriate emotions about the greatest historical tragedy or the smallest personal sorrow

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Review:

These two novellas about Americans abroad combine to create one wallop of a book. As they confront the legacy of history and their own shortcomings, Prose's characters are obsessively self-aware, even narcissistically petty--just like we are. In the title story, Landau, a struggling playwright, engages in a vanity-laden struggle of wills with a charismatic Holocaust-survivor in the cafeteria of a death camp-turned-tourist-attraction during a Kafka symposium. In the second novella "Three Pigs in Five Days," Nina is sent to Paris by her boss and ex-lover to write an article about a whorehouse-turned-hotel. While there, she is plagued by the demons of her erotic past as well as the romantic ghosts of the dysfunctional relationships of dead Parisian artists and their mistresses. Always harrowing, occasionally baroque, and tinged with hilarity, Guided Tours of Hell is an early candidate for the best fiction of the year.

About the Author:

Francine Prose has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Johns Hopkins University.

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