AETN Presents
On the Same Page with Francine Prose
On the Same Page with Francine Prose
Hailed by Larry McMurtry as "one of our finest writers," Francine Prose is the author of 12 novels, including Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Her newest book, Goldengrove (Harper Collins, 2008), was released to immediate critical acclaim.
Her most recent nonfiction book, Reading Like A Writer (2006), was a New York Times bestseller. This episode was produced in partnership with the Hendrix-Murphy Foundaiton Programs in Literature and Language 2009-2010 Theme: Word and Image. Reading like a Writer A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. 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 writersDostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhovand 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 Carr 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.
Anne Frank: The book, the Life, the Afterlife (2009)What is it about Anne Frank and her novel-like diary that has given this deceptively simple work such a long and spectacular afterlife? Why and how, against all odds, did a young girl's chatty, innocent, prodigiously well-crafted book become an integral part of our culture, our history, our souls, and our civilization? These are the questions that Francine Prose answers in Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, her powerful exploration of the life of Anne Frank and the phenomenon that is The Diary of Anne Frank. The book will appeal to the widest possible audiencegeneral readers, teachers and students, those who grew up with the diary, who want to find out more about it, and perhaps come to understand it in a deeper and different way.
