Reading Like a Writer. Francine Prose.

Reading Like a Writer. Francine Prose. 2006. ISBN 100060777044. A guide
for people who love books and for those who want to write them. This is
a guided tour of terrific writers and why their work endures, where it
lays out new methods, breaks or obeys rules and what each writer has to
teach you. Checkov, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Austen, Dickens,
Woolf, Le Carre, Joyce, Hemingway and many more (120 plus). This is what
your first year literature class might have been, had the prof truly
studied writing. Prose believes the path to good writing comes from the
study of great writers and how they deal with dialogue, words,
paragraphs, details, gestures, character and so forth. Completely
different and you may end up look at all writing with a changed view.