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Reading like a writer : a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them / Francine Prose.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: New York : Harper Perennial, 2007, c2006.Edition: 1st Harper Perennial edDescription: 273, 28 p. ; 22 cmISBN:
  • 0060777052 (pbk)
  • 9780060777050 (pbk)
Subject(s):
Contents:
Close reading -- Words -- Sentences -- Paragraphs -- Narration -- Character -- Dialogue -- Details -- Gesture -- Learning from Chekhov -- Reading for courage -- Books to be read immediately.
Summary: Before there were workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says author and teacher Prose. Prose invites you on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the very best writers and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for 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.--From publisher description.
List(s) this item appears in: NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 808.02 P966 Available 33111005116401
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A distinguished novelist and critic inspires readers and writers with this 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 Francine Prose.

As she takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters--Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov--Prose discovers why these writers endure. She takes pleasure in the signature elements of such outsatanding writers as Philip Roth, Isaac Babel, John Le Carré, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. Throughout, 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.

Close reading -- Words -- Sentences -- Paragraphs -- Narration -- Character -- Dialogue -- Details -- Gesture -- Learning from Chekhov -- Reading for courage -- Books to be read immediately.

Before there were workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says author and teacher Prose. Prose invites you on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the very best writers and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for 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.--From publisher description.

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