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. </p>

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 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 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. </p>

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. </p>

教學與創作經驗俱豐的Prose，逐一解析遣詞、用句、段落、敘述、人物、對話、細節鋪排等結構小說的要素，並摘引作品為例證，她選擇了Denis Johnson和John le Carré與契訶夫、福樓拜的作品，嚴肅與通俗文學並讀。

Prose著有十四本小說，獲多項獎項獎助，也曾任教於愛荷華寫作工作坊與約翰．霍普金斯大學。