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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.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Books and reading, Rhetoric, Creative writing, English language, Authors, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Boston Authors Club, Prose, Francine, -- 1947- -- Books and reading, English language -- Rhetoric, Authors -- Books and reading, Kreativt skrivande, Böcker och läsning, Författare, New York Times reviewed, English language, rhetoricPeople
Francine Prose (1947-)Showing 6 featured editions. View all 6 editions?
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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
April 10, 2007, Harper Perennial
in English
0060777052 9780060777050
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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
April 10, 2007, Harper Perennial
Paperback
in English
- 1st Harper Perennial edition
0060777052 9780060777050
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3
Reading like a writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them
2006, HarperCollins Publishers
in English
- 1st ed.
0060777044 9780060777043
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4
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
August 22, 2006, HarperCollins
Hardcover
in English
0060777044 9780060777043
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6
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
August 22, 2006, HarperCollins
in English
0060777044 9780060777043
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- Created April 29, 2008
- 8 revisions
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January 28, 2013 | Edited by Bryan Tyson | Edited without comment. |
January 28, 2013 | Edited by Bryan Tyson | Added new cover |
August 4, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |