Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas

“In a style that is brisk, witty, richly detailed, and suffused with a wry subtlety, Prose offers an astonishingly accurate anatomy of the human mind.”— Elle Writing with the elegance and humor that have brought her work international acclaim, bestselling author Francine Prose has created an exhilaratingly transgressive fiction that examines the difficulty of feeling the “appropriate emotions” about the greatest historical tragedy or the smallest personal sorrow. The less-than-innocents abroad in these daring stories are Americans in Europe involved in what turns out to be trips that change forever their ideas about history, politics, and sex. In the title novella, Landau, a third-rate American playwright, attends a literary conference in Prague, where an organized group excursion to a former concentration camp degenerates into a battle of wills and an exercise in egomania and public humiliation. Nina, the heroine of the second novella, “Three Pigs in Five Days,” is sent to Paris to write an article for her lover’s travel journal, a dizzying, erotic pilgrimage that forces her to see how sex has distorted her view of the world. An audacious book, Guided Tours of Hell dares to say the unsayable and to tip our most sacred cows.