New Releases by Francine Prose

Celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers the author admires above all others, from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose's previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus. Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story." Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.

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

"Inside these pages you will find poems, essays, and fiction from the next generation of women writers. Through the Girls Write Now program, each mentor-mentee pair develops and presents her best work at readings and events from Lincoln Center to the United Nations to the pages of this anthology. Structured around this year's theme, "(R)evolution," the Girls Write Now 2016 Anthology showcases the activism and power of today's emerging writers. These revolutionary pieces are evolving the narrative and changing literature, one girl at a time."--Back cover.

"A richly imagined and stunningly inventive story of love, art, and betrayal in Paris of the 20's, 30's, and 40's"--

"This exquisite, elegant volume includes every print made by the highly regarded American artist Terry Winters over the past fifteen years. Terry Winters' prints explore an enormous range of themes, from botany and biology to math and information technology. He has worked in nearly every mode of printmaking, including etching, screen-printing, lithography, and wood engraving. Frequently organized in serial groupings, Winters' prints display free floating cellular structures or clusters of spirals, knots, grids, and networks. His forcefully made works are rich in ambiguity and allusion. This book features fifty beautiful reproductions, accompanied by insightful texts and comparative paintings and drawings. The complete catalog of Winters' prints made between 1999 and 2014 is also included here, along with an essay by novelist and critic Francine Prose"--

"Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms," the first publication to comprehensively feature Jo Ann Callis' mid-1970s investigation of the nude body and sexuality, is a revelation; the work is provocative, seductive and remarkably fresh. The artist's playful, evocative use of constrictions and overlays on the human form, including twine, belts, tape and other everyday materials, are both humorous and fraught, offering an intensely personal assessment of the variable meanings of pleasure and the female nude as a staple of fine art photography. Callis has been an active artist since the 1960s, working in painting, sculpture and photography, among other media, and is known for capturing complex and often opposing emotions in a single piece. "Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms" is an exquisitely produced artist's book containing Callis' photographs of the human form from her 1976-77 provisionally titled series "Early Color," as well as a selection of black-and-white photographs from the same period. In this intimate volume, Callis photographs her models nude, frequently in close proximity, and in anonymous and mysterious settings, juxtaposing tactile props like honey, sand and fabric with skin. The photographs in this volume are at once beautiful and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful, and confirm Callis' important place in the history of 1970s color photography.

An "irresistibly readable" pair of novellas skewering Americans abroad—by the New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award finalist ( The New York Times Book Review). "In a style that is bold, witty, richly detailed, and suffused with a wry subtlety," Francine Prose offers penetrating portraits of Americans in Europe who have brought all their baggage—ego, ambition, sexual desire—with them ( Elle). Guided Tours of Hell When the insecure (and rightfully so) playwright Landau travels from New York to Prague to read at the first annual Kafka conference, he''s certain this is his chance to prove himself—and his work. But he quickly finds himself upstaged by Jiri Krakauer, a charismatic Holocaust survivor whose claim to fame is a long-ago death-camp love affair with Kafka''s sister. On a group tour to the camp-turned-tourist-attraction, Landau sets out to prove that Krakauer is lying—with unexpected results. Three Pigs in Five Days Ambitious young journalist Nina has been stranded in Paris by her editor and sometimes boyfriend, Leo. When he finally shows up, playfully suggesting a romantic tour of the catacombs, prisons, and shadows of the City of Light, the bloom begins to come off the rose for the infatuated Nina—who must ask herself how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice for love.

This tale of a family in Little Italy is "a minor miracle . . . documenting the madness and the grace of God in everyday life" ( Newsweek). On a 1950s September night so hot that the devout Catholics of Little Italy wonder if New York City has slipped into hell, the butcher Joseph Santangelo invites his friends to play pinochle. At the end of a long, sweaty, boozy evening, his friend Lino Falconetti, addled by wine and heat, bets the hand of his daughter, Catherine—and Santangelo wins. Santangelo''s modern new wife clashes immediately with his superstitious, fiercely protective mother. But years later, it is Catherine who is horrified when the daughter they raise turns out to have more in common with the old world than the new. From a New York Times–bestselling author, this story of two generations of an Italian-American family is imaginative, evocative, funny, and warm—and was made into an acclaimed film directed by Nancy Savoca, starring Tracey Ullman, Vincent D''Onofrio, and Lili Taylor.

Eleven "impeccably crafted, painfully hilarious" tales of innocence lost and families in search of connection from the New York Times–bestselling author ( San Francisco Chronicle). A reluctant trophy wife on her Italian honeymoon; a young woman in love with her sister''s dead boyfriend; a lonely puppeteer flirting with the hostess of a children''s party; a teenage girl traveling to Paris with her father and, unexpectedly, his young girlfriend. Francine Prose''s characters inhabit a world of rich emotion and startling clarity, searching for connection in a world full of surprise and humor; they travel, love, break up, and start again. Even their animal companions—a gecko rescued from a wild party, a dog who bites a bride, a hamster who dies unexpectedly and sends a family on a journey to give it a proper funeral—shine with the emotional complexity and sly satire that make Prose''s work such a joy to experience. In this collection, the New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award finalist demonstrates the craft, humor, and piercing human insight that make her, in the words of Gary Shteyngart "one of a handful of truly indispensable American writers."

The story of a troupe of actors in seventeenth- century Italy, from "one of a handful of truly indispensable American writers" (Gary Shteyngart). The Glorious Ones are an unlikely troupe of actors, traveling up and down the seventeenth-century Italian countryside performing commedia dell''arte for kings, for peasants, for anyone with coin. There is Armanda, the cheerful dwarf and ex-nun; chattering Columbina; Pantalone the miser; and the wicked Brighella—all led by Flaminio Scala, the self-proclaimed most courageous man in Christendom. But for all their wild differences, not one of them is prepared for the arrival of Isabella, their mysterious new director, who is about to turn their whole world upside down. Dramatic and imaginative, this tale of adventure, love, and theater is a historical romp from the award-winning, New York Times–bestselling author of novels, including Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, and Household Saints, as well as the literary guide book Reading Like a Writer.

A Haitian émigré''s exposure to shallow suburbanites is "social satire at its slyest and best" from the New York Times–bestselling author ( Kirkus Reviews). When the heartbroken Simone flees her native Haiti, her best option to start a new life is a quick paper marriage to a Brooklyn cab driver and a job as an underpaid caregiver to two spoiled young children in the small community of Hudson Landing, New York. But her new boss is nothing like what she''s been led to expect. The self-absorbed amateur sculptor Rosemary Porter and her morose, eccentric children George and Maisie—deserted by their philandering husband and father—rattle aimlessly around their crumbling suburban mansion. The people of Hudson Landing seem welcoming at first, but as Simone settles into this new home, her sense of unease grows. Rosemary''s sarcastic best friend, Shelly, seems as suspicious of her as her shallow boyfriend, Kenny, a children''s hair salon owner who appears eager to befriend the new au pair. A neighbor known only as "The Count" strings dead animals from trees for no reason anyone can understand. As the local community roils with secrets and attempts to outdo each other with self-importance, Simone begins to wonder just where on earth she has fled to—and if it''s any better than the violence and betrayal she left behind. As always, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose "has a wickedly sharp ear for pretentious American idiom, and no telling detail escapes her observation" as Simone struggles to make sense of these odd people and this strange, new world ( The New York Times Book Review).

From the "wonderfully quirky imagination" of the New York Times–bestselling author: A tabloid reporter is surprised to find magic in a mundane world ( The New York Times). Vera Pearl is a staff writer for This Week, a supermarket tabloid which trades in the bizarre and the absurd—though rarely, if ever, the true. No one is better than Vera at imagining these weird, wild stories, because more than anything, she wants them to be real. During one particularly slow week, Vera takes a photograph snapped by a colleague showing two children selling lemonade outside their Brooklyn home and drafts up a scoop to fit the snap, the story of two enterprising children who have discovered—and are profiting off of—the literal Fountain of Youth. By astonishing coincidence—or perhaps by magic—the details she concocts about the children (except for the properties of the tap water) turn out to be true, and hundreds of miracle-seekers descend upon this modern Lourdes-in-Flatbush. The resulting lawsuit sends this master of hoaxes into a very real tailspin: she is fired, her estranged husband flies in from Los Angeles to whisk away their precocious young daughter, and Vera takes off for Arizona to attend a meeting of the Cryptobiological Society, hoping for evidence of their furry quarry, Bigfoot. Just one glance, and Vera''s longing to finally transcend the quotidian may come true . . .

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 tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. 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 – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë’s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.

In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white-checked diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history. But Anne Frank''s diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of art as it is a historical record. Through close reading, she marvels at the teenage Frank''s skillfully natural narrative voice, at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into characters. Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.