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Reading Like a Writer
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
Critic reviews
"Prose's observations are incandescent, and her examples are thrilling, ranging from Samuel Johnson to Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Chandler, Stanley Elkin, and Paula Fox." (Booklist)
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Story
Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost, and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate.
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Fascinating plot, superb performance, psychological depth
- By Doctor George on 12-05-16
By: Javier Marias, and others
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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On Elizabeth Bishop
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this book novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences - the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.
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ELIZABETH BISHOP
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 05-19-16
By: Colm Tóibín
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
- By: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
- Narrated by: Edoardo Camponeschi
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was the greatest writer ever to come from Brazil and one of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction. Susan Sontag calls him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America", surpassing even Borges. Harold Bloom says that Machado is "the supreme black literary artist to date". And Allen Ginsburg calls him "another Kafka". And The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is his masterpiece, a dazzling, tragic, and profound novel that belongs next to the greatest works of his contemporaries Melville and Dostoevsky.
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A hidden masterpiece
- By C. Park on 08-09-18
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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The Sunday Philosophy Club
- An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith, winner of the first-ever Saga Award for Wit, has entertained millions with his beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mysteries. Now this phenomenally popular author introduces a fresh series, brimming with the charm and humor his stable of dedicated fans can't get enough of.
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Advice For Prospective Listeners
- By DCinMI on 02-18-13
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
What listeners say about Reading Like a Writer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Zephyris
- 05-28-15
Enjoyable Examples
I found that the narrator did not match the tone of the content, and that she somehow devalued it. Overall though, it was inspirational and I will be reading some of the suggested examples.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Cordelia Becker
- 03-30-15
I try to read or listen to this book once a year.
a great book on reading and writing. very well read ' very well writtem. I recommend
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2 people found this helpful
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- Tom Fury
- 06-22-21
pretty good and quite thoughtful
i figured I was missing something from all the classics I've rejected as bad literature and i was correct in assuming so. it turns out, while i may not appreciate the art, it is art none the less.
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- Believer50
- 10-13-17
I am Not Sure
A professor recommended this book to me to help with my writing career. I am not sure why because most of what was given was written like her life story and only little nuggets of facts were included. I tried to figure out what was so helpful in an 8+ hour listen but only came away with about 4 things. I guess that's better than wasting 8+ hours of my time and coming away with nothing. The narrator was very good.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Joy Broussard
- 05-25-23
A modern day little women
This novel leaves you with a wonderful warm and loving ache similar to the classic little women. Great, we read!
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- Horror Reader
- 01-11-18
Want to write? Read this.
Wonderful insights into the writing craft. Highly recommend. Multiple examples illustrate Prose’s points, and have now led me to some brilliant works of literature.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Fussy Reader
- 03-22-13
very useful
What about Nanette Savard’s performance did you like?
Very good and clear reading with some good acting-reading of the literary texts.
What insight do you think you’ll apply from Reading Like a Writer?
It is an excellent book for every writer, a very interesting approach to creeatrive writing and learning form other writers' tricks. Also, a useful material for discussion for every teacher of Creative Writing. It was a nice way of re-aquainting with literary classics. Highly recommneded!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Stephanie Carroll
- 04-27-21
Great read!
I figured I already knew how to read like a writer but this was still fun to see how someone else approaches it. Plus it was fun getting to know more about a lot of classics and learn about new ones to add to my list.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Gare
- 04-13-08
Practical, literate, generous
The treatment that you would expect at an Ivy league modern literature summer seminar. Good examples, truly helps to inform your focus as you read.
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30 people found this helpful
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- Peter Nosalik
- 12-30-20
Such a pleasure!
This is a great book for BOTH reader and writers. The performance is excellent and I love the content. It opened my eyes to writers I would not have known. Highly recommended!
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1 person found this helpful