Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.) | 
| Author: Francine Prose
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $10.88
You Save: $3.07 (22%)
Rating:  79 reviews
Sales Rank: 7970
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0060777052
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.02
EAN: 9780060777050
Publication Date: April 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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 Carré 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 74 more reviews...
 An MFA in a book January 1, 2009
I love Francine Prose's novels and her journalism. So, I figured this would be the same sort of clever, sardonic, on-the-mark writing that I have come to enjoy. Instead, I found an ultra-serious book that takes apart writing by the masters (and many new authors as well) and slowly analyzes paragraphs word by word. It's illuminating material, but also exhausting. I'm a very quick reader, but I found that one chapter took the stuffing out of me. So, it took forever to get through this book. However, I'm not complaining.
Once I was done, I felt that I had learned a great deal. More to the point, I had learned that all those stupid rules you learn from sub-standard writing teachers ("never use a narrator who dies") are just plain wrong. Then she goes on to prove it by taking each rule and showing how Chekov violates the rule in a beautiful short story. You want to scream at the top of your lungs: "I KNEW it!"
Best of all is the Q&A at the end of the book in which she talks about her theory of teaching writing classes, which is why I call this an MFA in a book.
My only question is why the publisher subtitled this "A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them." This isn't just for aspiring writers, this is for writers of any stripe. There isn't a writer of any ability--even those churning out bestsellers--who couldn't benefit from Prose's exacting study of words.
It's not simple reading, but then nothing truly special ever is.
Nothing Superflous November 4, 2008
"For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superflous, what can be altered, revised, expanded or especially cut is essential."
Good books help your writing. This book is stuffed full of terrific snippets from great books, Francine Prose teaches an entire course on writing well in the pages of "Reading Like a Writer." She explains what you need to attempt for good writing and then gives extensive examples. And sprinkled throughout the book you come to know Francine Prose as well.
Even for the shear enjoyment of a well written book, this one ranks top notch.
 Great concept. Poor execution July 10, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The concept is great. The product did not meet the promise. The presentation style was just too artsy-fartsy, like a bunch of undergraduate girls from the Seven Sisters, sitting around saying "Look how smart I am."
I couldn't finish the thing. It would be a great book to sleep to.
a very helpful guide to reading wisely June 28, 2008
I'm looking to improve my writing and I came across this book and decided to give it a listen. I was surprised at how helpful and fun it was. The text was very engaging, and you can tell the author put a lot of time into making this book not only informative but also enjoyable. I now look for specific elements when I read and have discovered the things I want to improve in my own writing.
Read Well to Write Well June 11, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Author Francine Prose's latest non-fiction book Reading Like a Writer, a Guide for People who Love Books and for Those who Want to Write Them, brings to the study to literature exactly what the study of literature needs: literature. She reads a text for what it offers as a unique assemblage of words into sentences into paragraphs into chapters into volumes. The author of a great work of literature creates carefully, deliberate placing each word for meaning and effect.
To study literature this way, one needs time. Time to read slowly, to savor the words, to appreciate the gift of literature. One might also need a dictionary. And of course Strunk and White's Elements of Style--a textbook developed early in the last century to set out in the clearest, most direct terms the basic rules of grammar and punctuation and how these things combined with our carefully chosen words create style.
In its pithy way, USA Today called Prose's book "A love letter to the pleasures of reading." That's exactly what it is. It is also a love letter to the pleasure of learning to write. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of writing that makes an author's work unique--words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue, details, gesture. The closing two chapters offer insights into "Learning from Chekhov" and "Reading for Courage." Prose draws on works of great writers and models reading to write. That is, by reading great works carefully, a student of literature who wishes to write develops a personal database of who does what well and learning to turn to specific writers for specific help.
For example, a writer struggling to effectively communicate character through dialogue might turn to authors he knows does that well--or to Chapter 6 in Prose's book. There the writer will find a close reading of passages from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which she does just that. The writer can take from that reading an example of just how to.
Prose's book unhooks literature from the life-support of the classroom full of sartorial know-it-all professors with their one and only way of reading a work and their critical methods--feminist, Marxist, Freudian, sociological, and on and on--to show that the life-support is totally unnecessary; the patient breathes quite independently, thank you.
To anyone whose parents suggest he or she study something other than English in college the better to secure a good job, I say take that advice. If you love literature and want to read it well, all you really need is Prose's book.
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