Reading like a writer : a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them / Francine Prose.

Reading like a writer : a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them / Francine Prose.

First edition.

9780060777043 hardcover
0060777044 hardcover

New York : HarperCollins Publishers, [2006]

©2006

English

273 pages ; 22 cm

PE1408 .P774 2006

808/.02

Before there were workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says author and teacher Prose. Prose invites you on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the very best writers and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carre for 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.

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