Francine Prose is the author of many bestselling books of fiction, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Prize, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her nonfiction book, Reading Like a Writer, was a New York Times bestseller. Among her 14 fiction books, her novel Household Saints was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. Another novel, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, which ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the Fall of 2007. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. A distinguished critic and essayist, Prose has taught literature for more than twenty years at major universities. She is the president of the PEN American Center board of trustees. Prose lives in New York City.
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Last Updated: April 3, 2014
The NYRB China Archive
06.26.08![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/beijing-coma-cover_0_0.jpg?itok=mM5FjmIS)
Casting a Lifeline
from New York Review of Books
Sixty pages or so into Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma, the hero, Dai Wei, is troubled by the memory of a harrowing anatomy lecture that he attended as a university student. Taught by “a celebrated cardiovascular specialist,” the class observed the...