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Francine Prose

Francine Prose is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard. Her novel, The Blue Angel, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel is My New American Life.

See NYRB titles related to this contributor.

  • Someone Else's Memories

    May 1, 2013

    Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux is as challenging to summarize or describe as a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. It shifts back and forth between present and past, reality and fantasy, childhood and adulthood; and it offers us a set of images and sequences to which it repeatedly returns.

  • Chasing the White Rabbit

    March 8, 2013

    Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own.

  • Chekhov in Data-Entry Hell

    February 27, 2013

    What’s most surprising about the HBO series Enlightened is the intensity with which Amy and her friends get to us—and how much of ourselves we may see in them—if we only have the temerity to allow it.

  • A Masterpiece You Might Not Want to See

    January 7, 2013

    Michael Haneke’s Amour is the ultimate horror film. Can a film be a masterpiece and still make you want to warn people not to see it?

  • Why Are Poor Kids Paying for School Security?

    December 12, 2012

    Why are the poor kids in the eighty-eight New York schools that have been equipped with metal detectors forced to spend five dollars a week—an expense that, for some, means going without food?

  • The Taming of Wuthering Heights

    October 24, 2012

    During the many dull passages—lengthy shots of fluttering insects and of birds wheeling over the scenic British countryside—in the latest Wuthering Heights, directed by the British filmmaker Andrea Arnold and now being released in the United States, I found myself wondering how anyone could have been convinced that what the culture needed was yet another cinematic treatment of Emily Brontë’s novel. If one counts feature films, TV mini-series, Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión (1954), and Kiju Yoshida’s Arashi Ga Oka (1988), audiences have had more than twenty opportunities to watch Brontë’s doomed lovers race across the wind-swept moors.

  • When Art Makes Us Cry

    September 6, 2012

    Art can do many things: dazzle us with its energy, its originality, its technical virtuosity; amuse, unsettle, or outrage us; comment on the culture in which we live; give us pleasure and provide us with intimations of mysterious beauty. It can touch us in ways that transcend the limitations of language. But less and less frequently does contemporary art do what Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” appears to have done—to inspire its viewers with anything approaching an extreme emotion.

  • After Aurora: The Devil We Don't Know

    July 31, 2012

    If we no longer believe in Satan, then what do we make of our sense that something is wrong with the world, that a random malevolent shooter lurks in the schoolyard or the cinema lobby?

  • Getting Them Dead

    June 6, 2012

    After reading the article that appeared under the headline “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will” in the May 29 New York Times, I couldn’t talk about much else. I found myself wanting to analyze it, as one might dissect a literary text, to better understand how it produced its effect on the reader: in my case, shock and awe, tempered by consolatory flickers of disbelief. Like literature, the story resists summarization, partly because the Times reporters, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, employ detail, word choice, diction, and tone to direct and influence the reader’s response without, on the surface, appearing to do so—and to make a familiar narrative seem new.

  • Making Up Edith Wharton

    March 21, 2012

    When Edith Wharton—then Edith Jones—was a little girl, her favorite game was called “making up.” “Making up” involved pacing around with an open book and (before she could read) inventing and then later half reading, half inventing stories about real people, narratives that she would chant very loud and very fast. The constant pacing and shouting were important parts of the game, which had an enraptured, trance-like, slightly erotic aspect. At ten, Edith was writing in blank verse. By eighteen, she had begun to publish poems—mostly on the subject of failed love, renunciation and longing, themes that would continue to resonate in her work throughout the decades. We can be glad, I suppose, that she discovered passion at all, but regretful that it should have taken her until the age of forty-six.