Washington Post (Free subscription) | 09/24/2008
Francine Prose has thought a lot about writing in the 35 years she's been trying to make a living at it. And one of the things she thinks is: It can't be taught.
New York Times (Free subscription) | 09/19/2008
In Francine Prose’s novel, a 13-year-old girl experiences loss and new awakenings after the death of her older sister.
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 09/19/2008
Goldengrove By Francine Prose Harper; 275 pages; $24.95 In "Goldengrove," Francine Prose tells the story of Nico, a 13-year-old girl whose life is torn apart by the death of her older sister. With perfect pitch and no trace of sentimentality, Prose, author of...
Seattle Times (Free subscription) | 09/19/2008
Francine Prose's novel "Goldengrove" tells the story of a family that suffers a great loss and the steps they take toward re-entering the land of the living.
Esquire.com (Free subscription) | 09/18/2008
Last Line is a column where authors discuss the last line they wrote. Typically it’s from a current project, but every once in a while a writer prefers to discuss the last line of something they’ve already published. In this such...
Philadelphia Inquirer (Free subscription) | 09/16/2008
Francine Prose says that Nico, the central character in her new novel Goldengrove, is urgently in need of wisdom. Nico, 13, doesn't know it, but she's about to be plunged into loss and suffering, and their manifold attacks on identity. She must handle these challenges on her own - and how she responds will be a measure of her character, and of her ability to heal.
International Herald Tribune (Free subscription) | 09/15/2008
Francine Prose's tale of a childhood summer tainted by tragedy transcends its formula, while Marilynne Robinson writes about a dying man and two of his children computing the losses in their lives and their distance from God.
Denver Post (Free subscription) | 09/13/2008
In "Goldengrove," her 15th work of fiction, Francine Prose takes on the topic of adolescent grief.
New York Times (Free subscription) | 09/11/2008
Francine Prose’s tale of a childhood summer tainted by tragedy transcends its formula, offering an unexpectedly rich, tart, eye-opening sense of its 13-year-old protagonist’s world.
JSOnline (Free subscription) | 09/07/2008
Goldengrove. By Francine Prose. Harper. 288 pages. $24.95. So much seems tragic when we're teenagers: our appeal - or rather, the lack thereof - to the opposite sex; our embarrassing parents; a spectacularly bad haircut. Nico, ...
Dialogic (Free subscription) | 08/24/2008
Books and circuses: The politics of literary scapegoating By Francine Prose Harper's ... On nearly every occasion when I’ve been invited to speak about both fiction and nonfiction writing, someone has asked my opinion of the scandalous disclosure that James Frey had fabricated sections of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. I reply that I’m puzzled that people seem more upset by a lie about how long...
Tayari's Blog (Free subscription) | 07/16/2008
I've just received a message from Francine Prose, the president of PEN American Center: Because Democracy is About the Government Listening, Not Listening In This week, the ACLU is taking out a full-page ad in a major national newspaper expressing our disappointment over this abandonment of Constitutional principles. The ad will print the names of tens of thousands of Americans who believe in the...
Tripping Toward Lucidity (Free subscription) | 06/28/2008
Book I’m reading: Reading Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Choclate for the most part. I started Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer , and while it's very good, it requires a little too much concentration. She dissects a lot of passages for their favorable literary quality, and my eyes hurt a bit much for that. I'll probably read her essays in between my other books. Number of books read since...
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 06/10/2008
Francine Prose's review/essay on Beijing Coma (subs. required) in the NYRB is making me eager to get this thing off my TBR pile. Sixty pages or so into Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma, the hero, Dai Wei, is troubled by the memory of a harrowing anatomy lecture that he attended as a university student. Taught by "a celebrated cardiovascular specialist," the class observed the dissection of the fresh corpse...
Tom Roper's Weblog (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
Francine Prose reviews Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square in the New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21437
