The follow-up and companion volume to the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor—a lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels to make everyday reading more enriching, satisfying, and fun

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.

Thomas C. Foster, author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor and Reading the Silver Screen, is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on 20th-century British and Irish literature and poetry.

“By bringing his eminent scholarship to bear in doses measured for the common reader or occasional student, Professor Foster has done us all a generous turn. The trained eye, the tuned ear, the intellect possesed of simple cyphers brings the literary arts alive.” — Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

“A smart, accessible, and thoroughly satisfying examination of what it means to read a work of literature. Guess what? It isn’t all that hard, not when you have a knowledgeable guide to show the way. Dante had his Virgil; for everyone else, there is Thomas Foster.” — Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, Patience & Fortitude, and Among the Gently Mad