Francine Prose

In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer...

A spirited portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art. One of 20th-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern...

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932 comes an utterly original novel inspired by the strange friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen and set during the summer when Dickens's family life exploded. In...

Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed - street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged - was a profound...

A dark house. An isolated island. Strange dreams and even stranger visions . . . Jack is spending the summer on a private island far from modern conveniences. No Wi-Fi, no cell service, no one else on the island but a housekeeper and the two very peculiar children in his care. The first time...

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles...

A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself. Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a...

A feminist reinterpretation of the myths surrounding Cleopatra casts new light on the Egyptian queen and her legacy....

“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and...

“Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature. . . . We are allowed to enter the moral dilemmas of fascinating characters whose emotional lives are strung out by the same human frailties, secrets and insecurities we all share.” —USA Today One spring afternoon...

The National Book Award Finalist from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose—now the major motion picture Submission “Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today It's been years since...

The less-than-innocents abroad in these short novels are Americans in Europe, involved in what turn out to be pleasure tours of hell: shocking, bewildering trips that change forever their ideas about history, reality, politics, sex - their entire lives....

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...

With her trademark acerbic wit and compassion, Francine Prose offers a sharp-eyed consideration of how men and women differ in their pursuit - and avoidance - of power, sex, and competition....

The setting is New York's Little Italy in the 1950's - a community closely knit by gossip and tradition. This is the story of an extraordinary family, the Santangelos....

The Polish monarch has outlawed a portion of the Jewish funeral rite, and none of the community’s lawyers, judges, or scholars will come forward to defend the custom before the crown....

“With a dazzling mix of directness and metaphor, Prose captures the centrifugal and isolating force of grief. . . . “[Goldengrove is] a moving meditation on how, out of the painful passing of innocence and youth, sexuality and identity can miraculously emerge.” — Los Angeles Times An...

Simone has fled the chaotic violence of Port-au-Prince only to find herself in a world no less brutal or bizarre....

The Glorious Ones travel the length and breadth of seventeenth-century Italy, playing commedia dell'arte in the streets and palaces with equal vigor....

“Francine Prose is a world-classsatirist who’s also a world-class storyteller.”—Russell Banks Francine Prose captures contemporary America at itsmost hilarious and dreadful in My New American Life, a darkly humorousnovel of mismatched aspirations, Albanian gangsters, and the...