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.
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Review This Product
Yearning for a bygone era
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 | Review
by: Judy Croome | @judy_croome
Prose’s love of classical literature is clear throughout the pages of this well-written and informative guide; as the front cover blurb from USA Today put it, this book is a “love letter to the pleasures of reading.”
However, it’s also elitist and takes several superior swipes at genre fiction. In her exhortations to readers who want to be writers, Prose does make a compelling case for learning to write by reading classical literature … and reading it slowly, word by word. Her list of “books to be read immediately” combined with the excerpts she included as her examples has added a considerable number of “must-reads” to my already teetering “to –read” pile.
While reading Prose’s well-written guide to writers, I was struck with a sense of someone yearning for a bygone era – an era in which life was slower and more easy-paced, and readers had the leisure time to sit and read 1000- page tomes slowly. For that reason, I found much of the admittedly good advice contained in this book could not apply to me as either a reader or a writer.
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