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. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. 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 who offer clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breath-taking paragraphs of Isaac Babel she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. She reads the work of the very best writers, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov, and discovers why these writers endure.

Identifying story beats, paying attention to pacing, interrogating POV & tense choices, mining good writing. 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. If you want to improve your writing, reading books with an eye to craft is essential. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take. 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 the author. By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

This book presents an inside look at how the professionals read and write.

Prose reading like a writer