What to Read and Why: Francine Prose

About this course:

Imagine someone with a broad knowledge of writers and their work walking you through a library and pulling the books off the shelf that you should read. Francine prose writes about George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, Jane Austen and Alice Munro, Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley, with brilliant analyses of their work to justify her choices. Not only do we learn what to read, but why each work is worth reading—a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in a 300-page book, which may inspire you to read her suggested works in their entirety. Anyone who has a secret, or not so secret, desire to be the smartest person in the room (you know who you are), is going to enjoy a heaping helping of erudition to warm up the coming winter. Text: What to Read and Why, by Francine Prose.