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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.

Download File Size:6.46 MB

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