Francine Prose

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Fall 2008

photo by Marion Ettlinger

Francine Prose is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. Her works include the novels Blue Angel (nominated for a National Book Award) and A Changed Man (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, a book on gluttony, and another on the life of the painter Caravaggio. She has written books for children and young adults, and contributes to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, where she is a contributing editor. A film of her novel Household Saints was released in 1993. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008.

The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has taught at The New School, Harvard, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. Prose is currently president of PEN American Center. (August 2008)

“If all the clocks and calendars vanished from the planet, people, especially children, would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their orderly tick, and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn’t ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone else is baking cookies or watching sports on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.”

—From Goldengrove

Biographical Update

Francine Prose published three new works in 2009: Touch, a young adult novel about harassment and the multiple versions of the truth; Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, which investigates the diary’s unique influence; and Rhino, Rhino, Sweet Potato, with Matthew Armstrong, a children’s story. (July 2008).