Francine Prose
Bestselling Novelist & Writer
Author of Blue Angel
“Francine Prose is a keen observer, and her fiction is full of wryly delivered truths and sardonic witticisms that come from paying close attention to the world.” —The Atlantic
“Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature.” —USA Today
Hailed by Larry McMurtry "[o]ne of our finest writers," Francine Prose is the author of twelve novels, including Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Her newest, and most recent nonfiction book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife was recently released by Harper Collins. Her other books include: Reading Like A Writer (2006), which was a New York Times bestseller, Goldengrove, A Changed Man, a novel; Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, a biography of the painter for the Eminent Lives series; After, an award-winning novel for young adults; Sicilian Odyssey, a travel book; The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired, a national bestseller; and Gluttony, a meditation on a deadly sin. She is also the author of Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams and Primitive People, two story collections, and a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Prose has also written four children's books and co-translated three volumes of fiction. Her stories, reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Art News, The Yale Review, The New Republic, and numerous other publications.
A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a 1999 Director's Fellow of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, Prose is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, for which she has written such controversial essays as "Scent of A Woman's Ink" and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Can't Read," and Bomb magazine. She writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. She has been the receipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1989 Fulbright fellowship to the former Yugoslavia, two NEA grants, and a PEN translation prize. In 2006 she was awarded the first Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction for A Changed Man. Prose has taught at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, The University of Arizona, The University of Utah, the Bread Loaf, and Sewanee Writers Conferences. A film of her novel, Household Saints, was released in 1993. In 2009, Prose was elected into the Academy of Arts & Letters. She lives in New York City.
About 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, and reach, the widest possible audience—general readers, teachers and students, those of us 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.
About GOLDENGROVE (2008)
At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl plunged into adult grief and obsession after the drowning death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity—and to fall into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend. Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer, charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life. Goldengrove takes its place among the great novels of adolescence beside Henry James's The Awkward Age and L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between.
About READING LIKE A WRITER (2006)
Distinguished novelist and critic Francine Prose inspires readers and writers alike 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. 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 Carré 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.
