How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers

by
Richard Cohen
Published in 2016
by Random House

In How to Write Like Tolstoy, Richard Cohen has assembled a compendium of techniques, obsessions, quotes, and exemplary passages by acclaimed prose writers including Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jonathan Franzen, David Markson, Gabriel García Márquez, and Francine Prose. Each of the twelve chapters focuses on a different element of craft, such as beginnings, point of view, dialogue, writing about sex, and revision, resulting in a book that illuminates for readers the range of perspectives in the writing of great literature.