Francine Prose's 6 favorite books

The author, critic, and former president of PEN American Center recommends works that guided her as she set out to write her new book

Paris
(Image credit: (Am)

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson (Plume, $15). It's impossible to write a book set in Paris, during any era, without reading Johnson's marvelously incisive and hilarious take on French culture and on how we Americans try to understand it — and just as frequently get it all wrong.

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (NYRB Classics, $16). Gallant was one of the most elegant, original, and precise prose stylists of all time. Her Paris stories go as deeply as any fiction ever has into all the darkest and brightest areas of the human psyche — and the human heart.

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