Summary
In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.
In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose's previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.
Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."
Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.
Author Notes
Francine Prose was born on April 1, 1947. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. Francine Prose novel The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007. Prose has served as president of PEN American Center, a New York City based literary society of writers, editors, and translators that works to advance literature in 2007 and 2008.
Prose novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. In 2014 her title Lovers at the Chameleon Club - Paris 1932, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With characteristic elegance, literary critic and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey) passionately pushes great books and good writing in a wide-ranging assemblage of previously published and new essays. Her thesis is simple: "What I am writing about here are the reasons why we continue to read great books, and why we continue to care." Prose's subjects include acclaimed novels, both old and new, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach; short story writers such as Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Taylor; and works of fiction by authors not primarily known as fiction writers, such as poet Mark Strand and photographer Diane Arbus. In one of the previously published essays, "Complimentary Toilet Paper: Some Thoughts on Character and Language," a close reading of John Cheever's story "Goodbye, My Brother" reveals how it subtly "layers the language of class, race, region, and unintentional self-revelation" beneath the narrator's self-aggrandizing words. In a new essay, "On Clarity," Prose cites models of clear writing from Dickens, the U.S. Constitution, and Camus that reveal clarity as not just a "literary quality but a spiritual one, involving, as it does, compassion for the reader." Prose's stimulating collection of essays will move readers to pick up, for the first or the 15th time, the books she so enthusiastically recommends. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An unabashed fan of reading recommends some of her favorite books.The prolific literary critic, essayist, and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey, 2017, etc.) follows up Reading Like a Writer (2006) with an eclectic collection of previously published pieces that continue her clarion call for how books can "transport and entertain and teach us." She sets the stage for the essays with "Ten Things that Art Can Do," enthusiastically arguing that art is essential to life. She deftly mixes biography and critical analysis to demonstrate how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein challenges us "to ponder the profound issues raised by the monster and by the very fact of his existence." Prose's love of and fascination with Great Expectations, Cousin Bette, Middlemarch, Little Women, and New Grub Street, "so engrossing, so entertaining, so well made," and Mansfield Park, "arguably the greatest of Austen's novels," will have readers anxious to revisit these classics. As a fine practitioner of the art of the short story, Prose feels a kind of "messianic zealto make sure that [Mavis] Gallant's work continues to be read, admiredand loved." Poet Mark Strand's "remarkable" collection Mr. and Mrs. Baby offers us distant echoes of "the dark comedy of Kafka and Beckett, the lyrical imagination of Calvino and Schulz." Prose also praises the work of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bowles, Alice Munro, and Charles Baxter. She loves how Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, about refugees, can "alchemize the raw material of catastrophe into art." Nonfiction is represented here too, as in Gitta Sereny's "so controversial, so profoundly threatening" Cries Unheard, about an 11-year-old killer, or Diane Arbus' Revelations, where the photographer "employed the grotesque as a staging ground in her quest for the transcendent." My Struggle, the six-volume autobiographical work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, is "dense, complex, and brilliant." Others discussed include Jennifer Egan, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward St. Aubyn as well as Roberto Bolao's 2666"literary genius."As Prose implores: "Drop everything. Start reading. Now." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
What if reading turned out to be even healthier than exercise? Prose, whose most recent novel is Mister Monkey (2016), poses this mischievous question in the introduction to her first essay collection since Reading like a Writer (2006). She also looks back at herself as an early and passionate reader for whom reading was a way of creating a bubble I could inhabit, a dreamworld at once separate from, and part of, the real one. A prolific, creative, and provocative writer and longtime teacher, Prose remains enthralled by books, especially fiction, fascinated by both technique and the humanizing power of story. A fluent and exacting critic, Prose conducts incisive, stirring readings of works spanning centuries, from George Eliot's Middlemarch to Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. Prose celebrates the subversive feminism in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and the sheer ballsy strangeness of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. She asks why Karl Ove Knausgaard's encyclopedic memoir-novel, My Struggle, is so hypnotic, and advocates gloriously for Mavis Gallant and Stanley Elkin, all the while urging readers to enter their own book-bubbles and nurture body and soul.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what to read and why By Francine Prose. (Harper, $23.99.) The novelist and critic combines previously published essays, reviews and introductions with some new writing to offer a wonderful reading list, ranging from Jane Austen to Jennifer Egan, cat flap By Alan S. Cowell. (St. Martin's, $24.99.) Cowell, a former foreign correspondent for The Times, tells a story with a Kafkaesque twist. A woman discovers that while away on a business trip, she has left part of her consciousness behind in the body of her cat. how to be famous By Caitlin Moran. (Harper, $26.99.) Moran, the British author of "How to Build a Girl," centers this novel on a 19-year-old journalist for a music magazine. Her unrequited love for a rock star and the unbridled pursuit of fame and fortune land her in some predictable trouble, obama By Brian Abrams. (Little A, $24.95.) For his fourth oral history - after producing books on "Late Night With David Letterman," Gawker and the film "Die Hard" - Abrams turns to no less than the Obama administration. It's the first comprehensive attempt at such a project, bringing together the anecdotes and eyewitness accounts of dozens of people who were part of the Obama White House, from cabinet secretaries to speechwriters. south toward home By Julia Reed. (St. Martin's, $25.99.) A contributor to Garden & Gun magazine and a resident of New Orleans, Reed writes a paean to the spirit and culture of the South. "There could be no better moment to read FLIGHT AGAINST TIME, by the acclaimed Lebanese author Emily Nasrallah, who died in March. The novel, set at the start of Lebanon's civil war in 1975 and published in 1981, throbs with detail about specifically Lebanese landscapes and social dynamics, yet it also encompasses themes roiling global politics today, from refugee crises to wrenching questions of identity. Reading it days after moving away from Beirut, where we lived blocks from Nasrallah for six years, I am particularly susceptible to her description of Radwan, an aging rural grandfather gazing at his village as he leaves to travel for the first time outside Lebanon. 'Suddenly he felt waves of strange tenderness that flowed from his heart, welled up in his eyes and ran down in tears,' she writes. 'Even the atoms of dust flying around him and settling on his shoes were as dear as gold. Radwan makes his way to Canada, where his children have emigrated. But he finds himself unsure where he fits: a new world of strange surroundings or back home where most of 'the young ones' have fled and where it may no longer be safe to return." - ANNE BARNARD, BEIRUT BUREAU CHIEF, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Library Journal Review
The title of novelist (Mister Monkey), critic, and essayist (Reading Like a Writer) Prose's new guide could just as easily be "How I Read and Why," or "You've Got To Read This," which the author claims in her introduction was her suggestion. With warmth, wit, and a keen intellect, Prose dives into the long (Knausgaard), the venerable (Austen, Dickens, Eliot), the modern (Bolaño, Egan), and underappreciated (Mavis Gallant), not to mention the work of two photographers. The book begins with longer pieces praising how authors such as Flaubert beautifully convey human frailties and ugliness, then continues with descriptions of misunderstood writers, difficult writers, and the thin line between erotic and pornographic art. Slightly shorter pieces touch on the impact of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women on a young Prose, how to write clearly, the joys of reading as a solitary activity, and a revisionist view of the oeuvre of photographer Diane Arbus. Some essays have appeared elsewhere, including one that looks at photographer Helen Levitt's Crosstown. VERDICT For all readers, whether compiling your own reading list from Prose's recommendations, passing on those she's read so you don't have to, or agreeing or disagreeing with her articulate impressions. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
