Best Selling Books by Francine Prose

"Presents the story of Dinah Rappoport, star of the Yiddish stage, and her three weddings - to the same man. The novel tells of her eventful performance in Anski''s classic play of thwarted love and demonic possession, The Dybbuk, its galvanizing effect on the hungry hearts of players and audience alike, and the unexpected ways in which the play''s themes resonate in Dinah''s own life"--Goodreads website, viewed May 30, 2024.

A short story by Francine Prose from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.

In this new fable about the power of imagination, the people of Leipzig have marveled at the amazing tales told by Leopold, and for generations believed his stories were true. That is, until a scientist and explorer arrives and accuses Leopold of being a liar. Full color.

An essay by Xavier F. Salomon, Frick Curator, paired with a contribution by author Francine Prose bring to life one of Titian''s most personal and revealing portraits. Author of lives of saints, scurrilous verses, comedies, tragedies, and innumerable letters, Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) attained considerable wealth and influence, in part through literary flattery and blackmail. Little is known of his early years, but by 1527 he had settled permanently in Venice. Among Aretino''s friends and patrons were some of the most prominent figures of his time, several of whom gave him gold chains such as the one he wears in this portrait. He was on intimate terms with Titian, who painted at least three portraits of him. Here the artist conveys his friend''s intellectual power through the keen, forceful head and his worldliness through the solid, weighty mass of the richly robed figure.

Contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales on contemporary literature and culture, or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse.

“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 political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers--and the year when our country changed. During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories--and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York. What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women''s liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.

In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony. In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine''s Confessions and Chaucer''s Pardoner''s Tale, to Petronius''s Satyricon and Dante''s Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher''s idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size. "The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.

During a recent stint in Rome (on a Rome Prize Fellowship), photographer Tim Davis became drawn to the peculiar status of ancient ruins. "You are standing in a field in Italy, looking at a pile of rocks. You''ve seen rocks and these are rocks. But someone else--a friend, a guidebook, a scholar--sees a temple . . ." Fascinated with the degree of meaning making that we bring to bear upon such minimal visual cues, Davis tested this perceptual shift on suburban ruins--what he calls "a soon-to-be ancient past"--and found that it was possible to make pictures that "look like archaeology, but might just be the side of the road." The photographs in The New Antiquity trigger in the viewer that wonderful cognitive bafflement of which Davis is a virtuoso: a kind of "seeing as" that allows us to completely reconceive what is actually quite ordinary (albeit beautifully photographed) everyday imagery. The New Antiquity proves that the suburban landscape is uniform and global not only in its pristine props, but also in its decay. And as Davis notes, "The Imperial Romans did the same, shipping marble from Tunis to Turkey. This New Antiquity doesn''t come from a centralized authority, but spreads virulently through all fertile capital markets. And its rise and ruin occur quickly . . ."

The most revealing look at breasts. Photographs of breasts are everywhere: in museums, on book covers, in fashion ads, and on posters. Alluring symbols of womanhood, breasts have fascinated generations of image makers. Here, for the first time between two covers, is the breast in photography: the titillating breast, the maternal breast, the aging breast, and the symbolic breast. In Master Breasts, darkly witty political images of the 1970s jostle for space with Edward Weston''s classic nudes; Nan Goldin''s friends share pages with Robert Mapplethorpe''s gorgeously sculptured models. From Alfred Stieglitz''s classic studies of Georgia O''Keeffe to Mary Ellen Mark''s vivid documentary portraits, they are all here. Other artists include Cindy Sherman, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Mann. A witty and reflective Introduction from the acclaimed novelist and essayist Francine Prose further links the images, while a monologue from Karen Finley''s recent performance piece American Chestnut, "The Detective," reveals a young girl''s anguish about breast-inspired catcalls and jokes and then sardonically calls for similar cultural treatment of the male anatomy. Finally, in Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo''s radically funny play The Story of the Tiger, the benefits of breast-feeding are celebrated as never before.

Though mocked by the rest of the villagers, poor Schmuel the shoemaker turns out to be a very special person.

In this brilliant, wry, and provocative book, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose explores the complex relationships between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process. All nine women loved, and were loved by, their artists, and inspired them with an intensity of emotion akin to Eros: Hesther Thrale and Samuel Johnson; Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll; Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Lou Andreas-Salome and Friedrich Nietzsche; Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud; Gala Dali and Salvador Dalip; Lee Miller and Man Ray; Charis Weston and Edward Weston; Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine; and Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Illus.

Set in New York''s Little Italy in the 1950s--a community closely knit by gossip and tradition--this is the story of an extraordinary family, the Santangelos. "[Prose] writes equally well about sausages and saints, documenting the madness and the grace of God in everyday life."--Jean Strouse, "Newsweek."

Reeling from the shock of a failed romance, Martha, a fact checker at a chic fashion magazine, falls in with a group of New Age feminist goddess worshipers. She follows the group and their accident-prone leader, Isis Moonwagon, from the upscale beaches of Fire Island to the inhospitable Arizona desert, where a Native-American healer bullies them through the punitive rituals of the sweat lodge and the vision quest. But as petty tensions and major crises escalate out of control, the women''s longing to return to the "caring nurturant" ways of primitive hunters and gatherers shatters under the pressures of a more predatory reality.