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Reading Like a Writer
A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
320 pages
An invitation to slow down, pull up a chair, and marvel at the architecture of a perfectly crafted sentence.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting in a sunlit office with your favorite, most brilliant English professor. The pace is steady and deliberate, actively encouraging you to slow down and savor the mechanics of language. It wraps you in a cozy, intellectual mood, where the outside world fades away, leaving only the rhythm of words, the structure of paragraphs, and the subtle gestures of character. The prose is elegant yet entirely accessible, stripping away academic jargon to reveal the raw, beating heart of literary craft. It is a deeply inspiring experience that will delight aspiring writers and lifelong bibliophiles alike, forever changing the way you look at a page by transforming the act of reading into an intimate apprenticeship.
- Mood
- contemplative
- intellectual
- cozy
- inspiring
- Tone
- authoritative
- conversational
- passionate
- analytical
- encouraging
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the craft of writing · close reading · literary appreciation · the power of language · artistic mentorship
- The writing
- Elegant, lucid, and deeply attentive, mirroring the very carefulness it advocates.
- The arc
- Begins with a reverence for literary giants and evolves into an empowering, intimate dialogue about the mechanics of great art.
- Who it's for
- Aspiring writers and devoted bibliophiles who want to peek under the hood of their favorite novels to see how the engine works.
About the book
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 writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and 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 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 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.
Description from Open Library.
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