There's a handful of authors out there with whom I'd like to talk shop over multiple cups of coffee. (And by talk shop, I mean lace their coffee with borderline-lethal amounts of espresso, so I can get them really super wired, so they'll just talk and talk and talk while I sit there like a sponge designed for the sole purpose of absorbing genius.) Francine Prose is pretty high on that list. Though maybe strangely so: as I've said before, I'm maybe not so much a fan of her fiction, but I'm sort of crazy for the way her brain works when she talks about fiction.
It doesn't look like she plans on coming to Cleveland anytime soon. But that's okay, because her new book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, is coming out this September. Advantages over meeting the real Francine Prose include the ability to stuff her into my laptop bag so that I can reference her whenever needed, and the knowledge that spilling coffee on her will not generate hard feelings resulting in me becoming the target of satirical barbs. I'll admit, I'm weak. I wouldn't be able to handle that.
If you'd like to learn a little more about Francine Prose, you can check out a recent interview at The Atlantic, where she talks about the book, the sadistic culture of writing workshops, and how writing and reading are ultimately endeavors of passion and pleasure and love. I would excerpt part of the interview here but the whole thing's pretty much inspiring and it's hard to pick out any one part of it. (Michael Schaub at Bookslut is better than I.) I'm counting down the days until I can read the book itself.
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