Reading for her is “something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing it from not only far away but also up close in order to see the brush strokes.” Prose delights in Katherine Mansfield’s inspired word choice, the rhythm of Virginia Woolf’s sentences, and Chekhov’s telling details and the objective treatment of his characters. Prose, a heavyweight in contemporary American fiction, learned to write by reading, and Reading Like a Writer is both a testimonial to her own education as a writer, and, as the title suggests, a guide to the pleasures of close reading.Īddressing both readers and aspiring writers, Prose gives example after example of literary masterpieces and offers techniques for reading more attentively, for noticing and thrilling in the language on the page. Márquez’s impassioned response, his realization that literature’s possibilities are limitless, and the implicit connection between reading and the desire to write are exactly the point of Francine Prose’s new book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. “If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.

“I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that,” he said.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez once told an interviewer at the Paris Review that the first time he read Kafka’s Metamorphosis it nearly knocked him clear off his bed.

Prose reading like a writer