American writer Francine Prose is known for many things. She's a novelist, a short story writer, a critic, an essayist, and a professor of literature. For several years, she was president of PEN American Center, an organization dedicated to the degense of free speech and expression through the written word.
Her books include fiction, nonfiction (with works on historical icons like Anne Frank, Cleopatra, and Peggy Guggenheim), children's stories, and reviews in a variety of publications. The Guardian described Prose's work as "forthright, waspish, and very funny," while The New York Times said that she “writes sentences that make me laugh out loud.”
Here are nine Francine Prose novels to read now.
Bigfoot Dreams
Vera Perl is the star reporter of a sleazy supermarket tabloid where she spends her days writing obviously ridiculous and ethically questionable stories about miracle cures, UFO sightings, and the ever-elusive Bigfoot. At home, life is no less weird with an errant husband, a precocious daughter, and Vera's penchant for slipping into a fantasy life.
One day the paper's photographer gave her a picture he took and Vera made up a story on the spot. Against all odds, everything she wrote ended up being true, and the consequences are devastating.
Guided Tours of Hell
This collection of novellas from 1997 offers a series of portraits of Americans in Europe who have brought all their weird emotional baggage with them. In the title story, an insecure playwright travels from New York to Prague to read at the first annual Kafka conference, but finds himself upstaged by a charismatic Holocaust survivor whose claim to fame is a long-ago death-camp love affair with Kafka’s sister, and the playwright becomes obsessed with debunking him.
"Three Pigs in Five Days" is about a journalist stranded in Paris who is left waiting for her editor and sometimes boyfriend. When he finally shows up, he suggests a romantic tour of the catacombs, which makes her wonder if she's really ready to sacrifice herself for love of this man.
Household Saints
Joseph Santangelo, a New York City butcher, invited his friends to play pinochle. At the end of a long, sweaty, boozy evening, his friend Lino Falconetti, bet the hand of his daughter, Catherine. Joseph won, and now he has a new wife.
Catherine is young, modern, and not easily silenced. She's the polar opposite of both Joseph and his half-mad mother. As the years slide past, the city changes around them and Little Italy with it, but this strange family must find a way to hold everything together.
Hunters and Gatherers
Martha has just turned 30 and she feels like her life has stalled. Her last relationship ended poorly, her fact-checking job is underpaying and unfulfilling, and she has no direction in life or idea of what she wants to do in the future.
Martha is wandering along the beach when she spies a group of women performing a strange spiritual ceremony that ignites a passion within her for the first time in too long. These women have given themselves fully to the worship of the Goddess. After Martha earns an honored place in their budding religion, her hopes for self-fulfillment quickly fall apart as she realizes how much the New Age sucks just as much as the old one.
Judah the Pious
The Polish monarch has outlawed a portion of the Jewish funeral rite. For fear of attack and harassment, none of the community's Jewish leaders dare come forward to defend their customs before the king.
Only one man has stepped up to the challenge: old Rabbit Eliezer of Rimanov, the local eccentric. The rabbi is reduced to laughter at the sight of the king, for the country’s ruler is but a boy. So, he makes a bet: if the rabbi can convince the child king that there is more to the universe than meets the eye, the funeral rite will be restored. And so, he tells the king an array of stories that challenge everything he knows about life.
Primitive People
Young Simone has fled her difficult life in Haiti in the hopes of finding a quiet and more peaceful world amid the bright lights of upstate New York. But it turns out that the world of Hudson Valley, home of the wealthy and elite of America, is far more chaotic and violent than she could ever have imagined. Dead sheep swing from trees, lightbulbs are ceremonially buried, and women carve statues of a terrifying goddess from pumice stones.
The Glorious Ones
The Glorious Ones is an acting troupe, traveling across seventeenth-century Italy and playing commedia dell'arte to audiences big and small, rich or poor. Founded by the ingenious madman Flamino Scala, this ragtag company of players live lives as dramatic as anything in their plays. They've dealt with kidnappings, affairs, riots, and triumphs. But nothing has prepared them for the arrival of the mysterious Isabella Andreini, who has come to direct their wayward troupe.
Women and Children First
Prose's first collection of stories was published in 1974 and displays how fully-formed her gifts where even at the earliest point in her career. These are stories of the oft-contradictory nature of desire. In one, a young woman, disappointed by her lover, discovers that "what you'd hoped was the start of your life could turn out to be a scene from someone else's porn movie."
In another, a college professor finds himself unexpectedly attracted to the physical therapist caring for his dying father. A Manhattan gallery owner baby-sitting her infant nephew watches herself pretend to be her suburban housewife sister, but for what reason? A woman tries to reconcile her complicated feelings for her father with his newfound Hasidic faith.
The Peaceable Kingdom
This collection of short stories was released in 1993 to much acclaim. These smartly observed tales delve into the ways that modern life forces people to keep up facades of normalcy amid intense change.
A young woman on her honeymoon suddenly realizes that her ecologist husband will have to save the world without her; a melancholy young girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress finds herself chased around the city by the boy of her dreams; a puppeteer goes to a wealthy family's party to perform but falls into a curious game with the head of the household.
