Francine Prose

A blending of art and cultural criticism, travel writing, and personal narrative, Sicilian Odyssey is Francine Prose's imaginative consideration of the diverse cultural legacies found juxtaposed and entangled on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. She writes of the intensity of Sicily, the "commitment to the extreme," where the history is more colorful, the sun hotter, the cooking earthier, the violence more horrific, the carnival more raucous, the...

This tale of a family in Little Italy is “a minor miracle . . . documenting the madness and the grace of God in everyday life” (Newsweek).
 
On a 1950s September night so hot that the devout Catholics of Little Italy wonder if New York City has slipped into hell, the butcher Joseph Santangelo invites his friends to play pinochle. At the end of a long, sweaty, boozy evening, his friend...

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...

A witty and wry satire of New Age searchers, our spiritual longings, and our earthbound natures Martha is thirty, and her life has stalled. Her last boyfriend turned cruel long before he left her, her fact-checking job is underpaying and unfulfilling, and the aimlessness of her twenties-which she thought was just a phase-has become her defining characteristic. She is wandering along the beach when she spies a group of women performing a strange spiritual...

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...

Pobre niña rica, coleccionista de maridos y de cuadros, fundadora de la galería y de la colección que dieron entidad al arte del siglo xx, viajera, amante de la noche y de la vida social, gran lectora, divertida, manipuladora, complicada... el perfil humano y profesional de Peggy Guggenheim se desvela por fin en esta biografía breve pero completa, basada en el propio relato de su protagonista y el de quienes la conocieron. Y de fondo, todo el...

A spirited portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art. One of twentieth-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the...

The author of the Patrick Melrose novels presents a razor-sharp, fabulously entertaining satire that cuts to the quick of some of the deepest questions about the place of art in our celebrity-obsessed culture. In conversation with Francine Prose (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932), with an introduction by Paul W. Morris (PEN American Center).