In this follow-up to Reading Like a Writer, novelist, critic, and essayist Francine Prose considers why the works of such masters as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured. She makes a case for the solitary act of reading and shares intriguing insights about Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid, and other modern authors. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her rich and compact sentences and meticulously rendered characters, Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor, and Mark Strand for his depictions of unlikely transformations. Here too are "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story"—original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing.