“In a style that is brisk, witty, richly detailed, and suffused with a wry subtlety, Prose offers an astonishingly accurate anatomy of the human mind.”—Elle
Writing with the elegance and humor that have brought her work international acclaim, bestselling author Francine Prose has created an exhilaratingly transgressive fiction that examines the difficulty of feeling the "appropriate emotions" about the greatest historical tragedy or the smallest personal sorrow.
The less-than-innocents abroad in these daring stories are Americans in Europe involved in what turns out to be trips that change forever their ideas about history, politics, and sex.
In the title novella, Landau, a third-rate American playwright, attends a literary conference in Prague, where an organized group excursion to a former concentration camp degenerates into a battle of wills and an exercise in egomania and public humiliation. Nina, the heroine of the second novella, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is sent to Paris to write an article for her lover's travel journal, a dizzying, erotic pilgrimage that forces her to see how sex has distorted her view of the world.
An audacious book, Guided Tours of Hell dares to say the unsayable and to tip our most sacred cows.
Author Info
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.
