Reading Like a Writer

A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

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  • 2.67 ·
  • 6 Ratings
  • 30 Want to read
  • 1 Currently reading
  • 10 Have read

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Last edited by Bryan Tyson
January 28, 2013 | History

Reading Like a Writer

A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

  • 2.67 ·
  • 6 Ratings
  • 30 Want to read
  • 1 Currently reading
  • 10 Have read

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.

Publish Date
Publisher
HarperCollins
Language
English
Pages
288

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
April 10, 2007, Harper Perennial
Paperback in English - 1st Harper Perennial edition
Cover of: Reading Like a Writer
Cover of: Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer
2006, HarperCollins
Electronic resource in English
Cover of: Reading Like a Writer
Cover of: Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
August 22, 2006, HarperCollins
Hardcover in English
Cover of: Reading like a writer
Reading like a writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them
2006, HarperCollins Publishers
in English - 1st ed.

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Book Details


ID Numbers

Open Library
OL7281536M
ISBN 10
0060777044
ISBN 13
9780060777043
Library Thing
1148618
Goodreads
808979

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
January 28, 2013 Edited by Bryan Tyson Edited without comment.
January 28, 2013 Edited by Bryan Tyson Added new cover
August 4, 2010 Edited by IdentifierBot added LibraryThing ID
April 24, 2010 Edited by Open Library Bot Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs.
April 29, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from amazon.com record.