From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a collection of essays that reveal him to be one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics
While the essays in this collection range in subject matter from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each one wrestles with the essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity; and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the...
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a collection of essays that reveal him to be one of our sharpest, toughes...
The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen's tale of growing up, squirming in his own uber-sensitive skin, from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he's writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between bird watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelingly engaged with...
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen's tale of growing up, squirming in his own u...
Louis Holland, ein Rundfunktechniker, zieht nach Boston, wo seine Familie lebt: seine Mutter, eine frustrierte Aufsteigerin, sein Vater, ein linker Geschichtsprofessor, und seine Schwester, eine ganz und gar verwöhnte, ichsüchtige Frau. Kaum ist er eingetroffen, passiert Merkwürdiges - ungewöhnliche Erdbeben erschüttern die Stadt, und gleich das erste tötet seine Großmutter. Während eines erbitterten Streits um das große Vermögen, das sie hinterlässt, verliebt sich Louis in Renée Seitchek, eine leidenschaftliche, kluge Seismologin, deren Enthüllungen über die Gründe der...
Louis Holland, ein Rundfunktechniker, zieht nach Boston, wo seine Familie lebt: seine Mutter, eine frustrierte Aufsteigerin, sein Vater, ein linker Ge...
In this incisive collection of speeches and essays, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recalling his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. A remarkable and revelatory work from one of our greatest living novelists, "Farther Away...
In this incisive collection of speeches and essays, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have l...
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage--and a society--wrenching itself apart.
First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar...
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parke...
A true essay is "something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author's personal experience and subjectivity," writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction. However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was, in a word, risk. Whether the risks involved championing an unpopular opinion, the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably offending family, for Franzen, "the writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into...
A true essay is "something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author's personal experience and subjec...
A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections. Franzen returns to the themes that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his relationship with his uncle, recounting his earlier years in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism we've come to expect.
A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections. Franzen returns to the themes that have lon...
