Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them Hardcover - 2006

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.

Details

• Title Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
• Author Francine Prose
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition 1st/7th
• Pages 288
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Harper, New York
• Date August 22, 2006
• ISBN 9780060777043 / 0060777044
• Weight 0.81 lbs (0.37 kg)
• Dimensions 8.25 x 5.5 x 0.97 in (20.96 x 13.97 x 2.46 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects English language - Rhetoric, Creative writing
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2005058457
• Dewey Decimal Code 808.02