Francine Prose

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...

Holocaust survivor Meyer Maslow, the head of a human rights foundation, is baffled by the entreaties of Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi who inadvertently transforms the lives of other people in his attempts to change his own life.

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author weaves an ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off Broadway children's musical. Mister Monkey-a screwball children's musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee-is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp's lawyer, knows...

Chapter 38 of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, opens with the line "Reader, I married him." Now twenty women authors have spun original stories using that line as inspiration for this collection of unique, inventive, and poignant stories. This collection of original stories by today's finest women writers--including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more--takes inspiration from the opening...

An expatriate is beset by dark temptations in this tale by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley: “Her best novel” (The New Yorker).
 
Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, this is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool toward the girlfriend he left behind in New York—but his feelings start to...