Francine Prose

"It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island. But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on...

At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend. Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children...

New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose (Goldengrove, Reading like a Writer) offers an enthralling account of the life and work of one of the greatest painters of all time. Caravaggio includes eight pages of color illustrations, and is sure to appeal to art enthusiasts interested in one of history's true innovators. Caravaggio is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins' "Eminent Lives" series of biographies by distinguished authors on...

"Francine Prose is a world-classsatirist who's also a world-class storyteller."-Russell Banks Francine Prose captures contemporary America at itsmost hilarious and dreadful in My New American Life, a darkly humorousnovel of mismatched aspirations, Albanian gangsters, and the ever-elusiveAmerican dream. Following her New York Times bestselling novels BlueAngel and A Changed Man, Prose delivers the darkly humorous storyof Lula, a twenty-something...

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 shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus...

A novel about learning to live in a world stranger than any tabloid headline Though she's written dispatches from across the globe-covering the Loch Ness monster, live dinosaurs, and the ever-enigmatic yeti-Vera Perl never leaves the offices of This Week, a supermarket tabloid covering the universe's stranger side. Her reporting is done entirely inside her own head, and now she's contemplating a Bigfoot exposé that will astonish even the most jaded...

What really happened at the back of the bus? Did they, or didn't they? Did she, or didn't she? Something happened to fourteen-year-old Maisie Willard-something involving her three friends, all boys. But their stories don't match, and the rumors spin out of control. Then other people get involved... the school, the parents, the lawyers. The incident at the back of the bus becomes the center of Maisie's life and the talk of the school, and, horribly,...

Fleeing the terrors of her home, a Haitian woman finds that life in America is filled with its own hardships Simone has gotten used to living in fear. After years of dictatorship, Haiti has sunk into chaos, and death is ever present. But it isn't the corpse she finds on her doorstep that convinces Simone to flee the island of her birth-it's the night she sees her lover with his arm draped around the shoulder of another. Death is one thing, but she...

Stories of innocence lost, from a master observer of modern life The citizens of Prose's realm are perpetually experiencing surprises. Nothing is reliable in their world, where dream vacations, weddings, and parties go sideways; strangers make unexpected confessions; and even family pets can sow discord. The peaceable kingdom of the everyday is streaked with darker, harsher truths.

What is charismatic Holocaust survivor Meyer Maslow to think when a rough-looking young neo-Nazi named Vincent Nolan walks into the Manhattan office of Maslow's human rights foundation and declares that he wants to "save guys like me from becoming guys like me"? As Vincent gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do this, he also transforms those around him: Meyer Maslow, who fears heroism has become a desk job; the foundation's...