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

English

Series: P. S. Ser.

ISBN: 0060777052

EAN: 9780060777050

Category: Literary Criticism / Books & Reading/Language Arts & Disciplines / Rhetoric/Language Arts & Disciplines / Composition & Creative Writing/

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Release Date: 04/11/2007

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 writersDostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhovand 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 Eliots Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carr? for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery OConnor 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 Writerwill inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

Awards: New York Times Notable Books of the Year – null 

Excerpt: Unknown Property Excerpt

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

Illustrated: No

Format: Paperback

Height: 0.82 inches

Width: 5.38 inches

Length: 8.0 inches

Weight: 8.01 oz

Pages: 320