"Prose creates a sensitive, multilayered portrait of loneliness, betrayal, and longing . Captivating . A richly textured tale." Kirkus Reviews "Francine Prose has created one of the most extraordinary oeuvres in the history of American fiction. Her curiosity and appetite for risk and exploration are insatiable, and now, in Five Weeks in the Country , she has delivered her most lyrical, gleeful, and effervescent performance yet. It takes a literary genius to mine the fizzled friendship between two 19th century literary titans and to alchemize it into a brilliantly moving meditation on family, ambition, and celebrity." Scott Spencer "Over the years, Francine Prose has taken me all over the world, has deposited me in the minds of her original, often over-the-top protagonists, and has made me marvel at her prose. Five Weeks in the Country is her biggest tour-de-force yet, a book of great complexity and yet one that reads, page-by-page, smooth as silk and full of grace.
" Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Vera, or Faith "What seems at first to be a Victorian comedy of manners (one that is truly funny) about a houseguest overstaying his welcome, turns out to be twin biographies that reveal the tortuous inner longings of the world''s most popular writers: Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. Within the cracks of upper crust etiquette, fraught with language barriers and cultural differences, Prose unearths their fragile egos, tenuous friendship, and the painfully out of synch love they held for each other. Andersen and Dickens have been known to readers since childhood, but if Francine Prose hadn''t hosted me for five weeks in their company, I''d never have gotten to really know them at all." Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club "No one states problems more correctly, more astutely, more amusingly and more uncomfortably than Francine Prose . Her insights, the subtle ones and the two-by-fours, make me shake my head in despair, in surprise, in heartfelt agreement. The gift of her work to a reader is to create for us what she creates for her protagonist: the subtle unfolding, the moment-by-moment process of discovery as we read and change, from not knowing and even not wanting to know or care, to seeing what we had not seen and finding our way to the light of the ending." - New York Times Book Review on The Vixen "Masterful. a lovely tribute to the transformative value of imagination.
" - Washington Post on Mr. Monkey "Remarkable. [Prose] is the Meryl Streep of literary fiction, convincingly shifting between multiple voices and points of view-not just from book to book, but within a single work." - NPR on Mr. Monkey "Prose''s first memoir makes something dark and dizzying of a tumultuous decade." - New York magazine on 1974 "A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive." - Maria Semple, New York Times bestselling author of Where''d You Go, Bernadette "Combining elements of mystery and romance, Prose''s novel is a sly indictment of Cold War paranoia." - The New Yorker "In this wonderfully clear-sighted memoir Francine Prose catches a moment when idealism shifted and the world turned.
1974 is also a story about youth, risk and survival--a story women don''t tell often enough, perhaps. Wise, achieved, entirely satisfying." - Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren "Francine Prose''s sublime, haunting memoir shows us the Seventies in all its dizzying contradictions--the darkness and paranoia, the open roads and strange new connections. A world where some voices disintegrated, never to cohere again--while others emerged, brilliant and searing, out of the calamity. Poignant, mesmerizing, profound--1974 offers revelations not just about the Seventies but about our world today." - Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and New People "(A) madcap, razor-sharp comedy." - People.