What to Read and Why

March 12, 2018
With characteristic elegance, literary critic and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey) passionately pushes great books and good writing in a wide-ranging assemblage of previously published and new essays. Her thesis is simple: “What I am writing about here are the reasons why we continue to read great books, and why we continue to care.” Prose’s subjects include acclaimed novels, both old and new, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach; short story writers such as Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Taylor; and works of fiction by authors not primarily known as fiction writers, such as poet Mark Strand and photographer Diane Arbus. In one of the previously published essays, “Complimentary Toilet Paper: Some Thoughts on Character and Language,” a close reading of John Cheever’s story “Goodbye, My Brother” reveals how it subtly “layers the language of class, race, region, and unintentional self-revelation” beneath the narrator’s self-aggrandizing words. In a new essay, “On Clarity,” Prose cites models of clear writing from Dickens, the U.S. Constitution, and Camus that reveal clarity as not just a “literary quality but a spiritual one, involving, as it does, compassion for the reader.” Prose’s stimulating collection of essays will move readers to pick up, for the first or the 15th time, the books she so enthusiastically recommends.

April 1, 2018
An unabashed fan of reading recommends some of her favorite books.The prolific literary critic, essayist, and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey, 2017, etc.) follows up Reading Like a Writer (2006) with an eclectic collection of previously published pieces that continue her clarion call for how books can "transport and entertain and teach us." She sets the stage for the essays with "Ten Things that Art Can Do," enthusiastically arguing that art is essential to life. She deftly mixes biography and critical analysis to demonstrate how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein challenges us "to ponder the profound issues raised by the monster and by the very fact of his existence." Prose's love of and fascination with Great Expectations, Cousin Bette, Middlemarch, Little Women, and New Grub Street, "so engrossing, so entertaining, so well made," and Mansfield Park, "arguably the greatest of Austen's novels," will have readers anxious to revisit these classics. As a fine practitioner of the art of the short story, Prose feels a kind of "messianic zeal...to make sure that [Mavis] Gallant's work continues to be read, admired--and loved." Poet Mark Strand's "remarkable" collection Mr. and Mrs. Baby offers us distant echoes of "the dark comedy of Kafka and Beckett, the lyrical imagination of Calvino and Schulz." Prose also praises the work of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bowles, Alice Munro, and Charles Baxter. She loves how Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, about refugees, can "alchemize the raw material of catastrophe into art." Nonfiction is represented here too, as in Gitta Sereny's "so controversial, so profoundly threatening" Cries Unheard, about an 11-year-old killer, or Diane Arbus' Revelations, where the photographer "employed the grotesque as a staging ground in her quest for the transcendent." My Struggle, the six-volume autobiographical work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, is "dense, complex, and brilliant." Others discussed include Jennifer Egan, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward St. Aubyn as well as Roberto Bolaño's 2666--"literary genius."As Prose implores: "Drop everything. Start reading. Now."

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June 1, 2018
What if reading turned out to be even healthier than exercise? Prose, whose most recent novel is Mister Monkey (2016), poses this mischievous question in the introduction to her first essay collection since Reading like a Writer (2006). She also looks back at herself as an early and passionate reader for whom reading was a way of creating a bubble I could inhabit, a dreamworld at once separate from, and part of, the real one. A prolific, creative, and provocative writer and longtime teacher, Prose remains enthralled by books, especially fiction, fascinated by both technique and the humanizing power of story. A fluent and exacting critic, Prose conducts incisive, stirring readings of works spanning centuries, from George Eliot's Middlemarch to Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. Prose celebrates the subversive feminism in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and the sheer ballsy strangeness of Roberto Bola�o's 2666. She asks why Karl Ove Knausgaard's encyclopedic memoir-novel, My Struggle, is so hypnotic, and advocates gloriously for Mavis Gallant and Stanley Elkin, all the while urging readers to enter their own book-bubbles and nurture body and soul.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2018

The title of novelist (Mister Monkey), critic, and essayist (Reading Like a Writer) Prose's new guide could just as easily be "How I Read and Why," or "You've Got To Read This," which the author claims in her introduction was her suggestion. With warmth, wit, and a keen intellect, Prose dives into the long (Knausgaard), the venerable (Austen, Dickens, Eliot), the modern (Bola�o, Egan), and underappreciated (Mavis Gallant), not to mention the work of two photographers. The book begins with longer pieces praising how authors such as Flaubert beautifully convey human frailties and ugliness, then continues with descriptions of misunderstood writers, difficult writers, and the thin line between erotic and pornographic art. Slightly shorter pieces touch on the impact of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women on a young Prose, how to write clearly, the joys of reading as a solitary activity, and a revisionist view of the oeuvre of photographer Diane Arbus. Some essays have appeared elsewhere, including one that looks at photographer Helen Levitt's Crosstown. VERDICT For all readers, whether compiling your own reading list from Prose's recommendations, passing on those she's read so you don't have to, or agreeing or disagreeing with her articulate impressions. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]--Liz French, Library Journal

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018

Eminent and fluidly prolific novelist Prose (e.g., Mister Monkey) is also an acute literary critic, as this follow-up to her New York Times best-selling Reading Like a Writer should attest. Here she assesses authors from Jane Austen to Roberto Bolano while arguing that the solitary act of reading brings joyous reliefin a noisy, overconnected world.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.