Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.) - Softcover

Prose, Francine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060777052 ISBN 13: 9780060777050

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2007

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 Carré 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

About the Author:

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction, including Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include 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, a Fulbright, and a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she 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. She lives in New York City.

From AudioFile:

Reader Nanette Savard meets every requirement of this nonfiction work by novelist and critic Francine Prose. Savards voice captures the authors tone of authority as she sets forth her dual mission: to help passionate readers and would-be writers understand how a writer reads. Savards crisp syllables highlight Proses literary analysis, and her rhythms project Proses love of language. Personal anecdotes from Prose include her reflections on a twelfth-grade teacher who taught her close reading, a formative practice that changed her forever. Plenty of literary excerpts are included--Savards pauses eloquently capture Proses thoughtful quality as she discusses them. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060777052
• ISBN 13: 9780060777050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 273