Francine Prose has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 15 narrators, with an average listener rating of 2.6★ across 8 ratings. The most-rated is Reading Like a Writer.
Reading Like a Writer
Summary
In this entertaining and edifying New York Times best-seller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters and to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire listeners 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 Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue; and to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail. And, most importantly, she cautions listeners to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted.
©2006 Francine Prose (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers
A Changed Man
Summary
"Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature.... We are allowed to enter the moral dilemmas of fascinating characters whose emotional lives are strung out by the same human frailties, secrets and insecurities we all share." (USA Today) One spring afternoon, Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi walks into the office of a human rights foundation headed by Meyer Maslow, a charismatic Holocaust survivor. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger with Waffen SS tattoos who says that his mission is to save guys like him from becoming guys like him? As Vincent gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do that, he also begins to transform everyone around him, including Maslow himself. Masterfully plotted, darkly comic, A Changed Man poses essential questions about human nature, morality, and the capacity for change, illuminating the everyday transactions, both political and personal, in our lives.
©2005 Francine Prose (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
Summary
A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself. Paris in the 1920s: It is a city of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club's loyal denizens, including the rising photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine. As the years pass, their fortunes - and the world itself - evolve. Lou falls in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant '20s give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more sinister: Collaboration with the Nazis. Told in a kaleidoscope of voices, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy. A brilliant work of fiction and a mesmerizing listen, it is Francine Prose's finest novel yet.
©2014 Francine Prose (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
Blue Angel
Summary
The National Book Award finalist from acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Francine Prose - now the major motion picture Submission. It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative-writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. Better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.... Deliciously risque, Blue Angel is a withering take on today's academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics collide with political correctness.
©2000 Francine Prose (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Mister Monkey
Summary
The acclaimed New York Times best-selling author weaves an ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off-Broadway children's musical. Mister Monkey - a screwball children's musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee - is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp's lawyer, knows the production is dreadful and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She's settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part - until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the 12-year-old who plays the title role. Francine Prose's effervescent comedy is told from the viewpoints of wildly unreliable, seemingly disparate characters whose lives become deeply connected as the madcap narrative unfolds. There is Adam, whose looming adolescence informs his interpretation of his role; Edward, a young audience member who is candidly unimpressed with the play; Ray, the author of the novel on which the musical is based, who witnesses one of the most awkward first dates in literature; and even the eponymous Mister Monkey, the Monkey God himself. With her trademark wit and verve, Prose delves into humanity's most profound mysteries: art, ambition, childhood, aging, and love. Startling and captivating, Mister Monkey is a breathtaking novel from a writer at the height of her craft.
©2016 Francine Prose (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
What to Read and Why
Summary
In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times best seller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño. 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 listeners a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.
©2018 Francine Prose (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Peggy Guggenheim
Summary
A spirited portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art. One of 20th-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene, and her museum on the Grand Canal in Venice remains one of the world's great collections of modern art. Yet as renowned as she was for the art and artists she so tirelessly championed, Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life and for her ironic, playful desire to shock. Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a listen of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of 21st-century art as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs. Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. She also explores the ways in which Guggenheim's image was filtered through the lens of insidious anti-Semitism.
©2015 Francine Prose (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Primitive People
Summary
What are these barbaric rituals that pass for social and family life? Who are these fearsome creatures who linger in decaying mansions and at glittery malls, trendy weddings and dinner parties? These are the questions that trouble Simone, a beautiful, smart young Haitian woman. She has fled the chaotic violence of Port-au-Prince only to find herself in a world no less brutal or bizarre - a seemingly civilized landscape where dead sheep swing from trees, light bulbs are ceremonially buried, fur-clad mothers carve terrifying goddesses out of pumice...and where learning to lie is the principal rite of passage into adulthood. The primitive people of this darkly satiric novel are not, as one might expect, the backward denizens of some savage isle, but the wealthy inhabitants of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York.
©1992 Francine Prose (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Caravaggio
Summary
Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed - street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged - was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, makes him an artist who speaks across the centuries to our own time. Born in 1571 near Milan, Michelangelo Merisi (da Caravaggio) moved to Rome when he was 21 years old. He became a brilliant and successful artist, protected by the influential Cardinal del Monte and other patrons. But he was also a man of the streets who couldn't seem to free himself from its brawls and vendettas. In 1606 he fled Rome, apparently after killing another man in a dispute. He spent his last years in exile, in Naples, Malta, and Sicily, at once celebrated for his art and tormented by his enemies. Through it all, he produced masterpieces of astonishing complexity and power. Eventually he received a pardon from the Pope, only to die, in mysterious circumstances, on the way back to Rome in 1610.
©2005 Francine Prose (P)2020 Tantor