书名：How to Read Novels Like a Professor 如何阅读一本小说
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1150
作者：Thomas C. Foster
出版社名称：Harper Perennial
出版时间：2008
语种：英文
ISBN：9780061340406
商品尺寸：13.5 x 1.9 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：312 （以实物为准）

《傲慢与偏见》《了不起的盖茨比》《百年孤独》……你也许读过这些经典小说，但透过这本书，你可以真正读懂它们；如果你没有读过，那也没关系，因为读过这本书后，我保证你会迫不及待想阅读它们！——博客来这本书不但能帮助读者阅读小说，还能帮助作者写作小说，它带你充分领会小说人物、结构、节奏、声音等等背后的意旨。——美国亚马逊
在所有类型的文学形式中，小说是毫无争议大家讨论得非常多的一种。在这本集趣味性和实用性于一身的小说阅读指南中，托马斯•福斯特教授将带领我们领略超过两百部小说作品，包括久经考验的大师作品和脍炙人口的畅销作品，详解小说的历史渊源，让我们领会小说的阅读之乐，让我们读懂小说的题眼和密码。美国很受欢迎的文学教授教你读懂小说的22个法则：读懂一本小说，就是多活一次人生；让阅读成为我们的生活方式：认真对待小说，就是认真对待生活。
Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed… and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today’s masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history. 
Thomas C. Foster — the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor — now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors’ choices about structure — point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity — create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading. 

托马斯·福斯特（Thomas Foster）：美国密歇根大学教授，专长20世纪英国、爱尔兰及美国文学，教授经典文学和当代文学课程，同时教授创意写作。著有多部学术研究著作及畅销文学阅读指南书。
Thomas C. Foster is a professor of English at the University of Michigan-Flint, where he teaches classic and contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as creative writing and composition. In addition toHow to Read Novels Like a Professor, he is the author ofHow to Read Literature Like a Professor and several books on twentieth-century British and Irish fiction and poetry. He lives in East Lansing, Michigan. 

Preface: Novel Possibilities, or All Animals Aren’tPigs?
Introduction: Once Upon a Time: A Short, Chaotic, and Entirely Idiosyncratic History of the Novel 
 1  Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages
 2  You Can’t Breathe Where the Air Is Clear
 3  Who’s in Charge Here?
 4  Never Trust a Narrator with a Speaking Part
 5  A Still, Small Voice (or a Great, Galumphing One)
 6  Men (andWomen) Made out of Words, or My Pip Ain’t Like Your Pip
 7  When Very Bad People Happen to Good Novels
 8  Wrinkles in Time, or Chapters Just Might Matter
 9  Everywhere Is Just One Place
10  Clarissa’s Flowers
11  Met-him-pike-hoses
12 Life Sentences
13 Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness
14 The Light on Daisy’s Dock
15 Fiction About Fiction
16 Source Codes and Recycle Bins
Interlude: Read with Your Ears
17  Improbabilities: Foundlings and Magi, Colonels and Boy Wizard 
18  What’s the Big Idea-or Even the Small One?
19  Who Broke My Novel?
20  Untidy Endings
21  History in the Novel/The Novel in History
22  Conspiracy Theory
Conclusion: The Never-Ending Journey
Reading List: Criticism of the Novel

前言不是所有的动物都是猪？
引言 一部简短、混杂而独特的小说史
1第1行和开篇的诱惑
2在明净的地区，你不能呼吸
3这里谁说了算？
4永远不要因为叙述者说话就相信他
5一个安静微小的声音
6用词语创造出来的人
7当好小说里有大坏蛋
8时间的波纹
9普遍性就是特殊性
10克拉丽莎的鲜花
11灵魂转世
12有生命的句子
13淹没在意识流中
14黛西家码头上的灯
15关于小说的小说
16旧瓶装新酒课间休息 用耳朵来阅读
17不可能吗？弃儿和玛奇，上校和小巫师
18什么是大问题，或者，什么是小问题？
19谁动了我的小说？
20混沌的结局
21小说中的历史，或者，历史中的小说
22共谋论
结语没有尽头的旅程
阅读书目关于小说的批评

EVERWATCH PEOPLE IN bookstores? They pull a book from a shelf, read the cover, then the back cover, then the benefits page (that little number with all the blurbs on it, if it’s a paperback), and then... what? You know this one. Hardly anyoneI’ve ever noticed has leapt into the middle of Chapter 23, so that first page had better deliver the goods. Otherwise, the book goes back on the shelf. You can’t read ’em all.
We needfast pages —and so donovelists. Right from the top, a novel begins working its magic on readers. Perhaps more remarkably, readers also begin working their magic on the novel. The beginning of a novel is,variously, a social contract negotiation, an invitation to a dance, a list of rules of the game, and a fairly complex seduction. I know, I know —seduction? Seems extreme, doesn’t it?
But that’s what’s going on at the beginning of a novel. We’re being asked to commit a lot of time and energy to an enterprise with very little in the way of guarantee of what’s in it for us. That’s where the seduction comes in. And it wants to tell us what it thinks is important,so much so that it can’t wait to get started. Perhaps more importantly, itwants us to get involved. When it’s over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember. The opening of a novel is an invitation to come inside and play. The first page, in this context, is not so much a guarantee as a promissory note:“Hey,” it says, “I’ve got something good here.You’ll like it. You can trust me. Give me a whirl.” And that’s why the very first line is so important. Try a few of these on for size.
“What’s it going to be, then?”
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
“This is the saddest story I ever heard.”
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, ColonelAureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” 
“At an age when most young Scotsmen werelifting skirts,plowing furrows and spreading seed. MungoPark was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj’ Ali Ibu Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.”