Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16036 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
This book presents an inside look at how the professionals read and write. 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 the author. 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 these writers endure. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breath-taking 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 who offer 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.

Customer Reviews

Not very good
This isn't a very good book. It should be re-titled as "How to read like a writer: me". The book starts of nicely with a very interesting chapter concerning Close Reading, but then the quote festival begins. For chapters and chapters all the author does is to present us with huge quotes from literary geniuses and to display a very small and insipid subjective opinion on them which scarcely relates to the chapter topic.
I only give it two stars for the first chapter and the one entitled "Learning with Checkov".
Reading this is a kind of torture: very disapointing.
I would recommend "How to read a book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

This Refreshing Book
Francine Prose explicates on writing creatively with a masterful analysis. The rules for storytelling are refreshingly challenged, using many examples of well-known author's writing styles. This is a book for reflective readers, who love the way words are woven to create and tell a story. For writers who want to create stories that are not hidebound by dead rules. In the first chapter Prose poses the question: "Can creative writing be taught?" Her answer to this, we learn to write by trial and error, and by example when reading books. Reading slowly, carefully, and concentrating on the writers for whom every word in a paragraph is essential for reader impact. In my estimation, this is a most stimulating book for anyone fascinated with novel reading and writing.

Disappointing
From this book, I am stimulated to search out two authors' pieces of writing: ZZ Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" and Samuel Becket's "First Love". I found the chapter on opening paragraphs stimulating but other than that, I was very disappointed. Every other chapter failed to deliver mainly because the examples of writing were not to my taste. For brilliant dialogue, there was no mention of Anne Tyler or Charles Webb. Everyone would be far better to study in detail the writers they like and not waste their time on this book which uses examples from writers I have no interest in and, judging by the excerpts she offers, I'm not surprised.