How to Read a Novelist

John Freeman
$22.94 $26.99

The novel is alive and well, thank you very much

For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he's learned.
From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to everyone.
What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader--a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made it possible.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Fsg Originals
Published: 10/08/2013
ISBN: 9780374173265
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 7.50h x 5.09w x 1.01d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 07/08/2013
Library Journal 10/01/2013 pg. 74
Booklist 10/15/2013 pg. 10
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2013