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Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Francine Prose's website
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You open your novel A Changed Man with a character most of your
readers probably have never met: the ex-skinhead Vincent Nolan. Was this
"changed man" the inspiration for the book?
I certainly began with him. I was on the subway in New York once, and I saw
these two very young skinheads -- all dressed up, with jackboots and shaved
heads -- and I noticed that they looked terrified, like they'd been dropped from
Mars. It was very clear to me that they were out of their element; this was not
their home territory at all. That made me curious about who they were and what
kind of people they were. Then I began to do research.
It's strange how life imitates art. Later I was in an elevator in Manhattan,
and there was a middle-aged guy with his hair growing over tattoos on his head
-- it looked as if a swastika had been there, and the laser removal hadn't done
a good job. I thought this is my character, 10 years later.
Were there other topics you were keeping in mind as you wrote?
My aim was to write about this character, but I wasn't necessarily writing
about neo-Nazis. I was writing about what it means to be a good person, what it
means to change -- and how our culture hypes this change, this growing. As I...
David Hopen is from Hollywood, Florida. He graduated from Yale College and earned his master's degree from the University of Oxford. The Orchard is his debut novel. (more)
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Christopher Buckley is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor and memoirist. His books have been translated into sixteen foreign languages. He worked as a merchant seaman and White House speechwriter. He has ... (more)
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