Francine Prose

One of the secrets of Francine Prose’s success is that she doesn’t assume you care about the same things that she does, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. In her 22 novels, the Brooklynborn author and critic has often tackled weighty themes while writing for highly distracted readers—like herself. “I’m easily bored by books, I hate to say,” she admits. “And so I want there to be some sort of suspense or some sort of payoff.” Her new novel, The Vixen, manages to be hilarious and suspenseful even though it’s essentially about the 1953 execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The book focuses on a lowlevel publishing employee who’s torn when he’s assigned to edit a potboiler that depicts the Ethel stand-in—who once knew his mother—as a nymphomaniac spy. “We have to entertain ourselves somehow,” Prose says.

But there’s a purpose to those inventions, said Daniel Lefferts in Publishers Weekly. Prose wrote the novel, she says, as a way of thinking through the “horrible polarization of our era,” the threats to free speech, and many Americans’ perception that we are routinely being lied to. The former president of the PEN American Center has a track record of speaking out about the misuses of language and writing even as she has defended writers’ freedoms. Once, she rebuked PEN for giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, arguing that the terrorist shooting of 23 people at the satirical weekly’s Paris offices did not make it heroic that the publication had previously run cartoons that mocked Islam. In such cases, staying silent doesn’t feel like an option. “I couldn’t not do it,” she says. “It’s a kind of compulsion.”