Jonathan Franzen

"After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The...

"A huge-canvased novel about identity, the internet, sexual politics, and love from the author of Freedom and The Corrections"-- Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose...

Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections… Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays...

A jovem Pip Tyler n?o sabe quem e. Sabe que o seu nome verdadeiro e Purity, que tem as costas um emprestimo de cento e trinta mil dolares contraido para poder tirar um curso, que vive numa casa ocupada com anarquistas de Oakland, e que a sua relac?o com a m?e - a unica familia que tem - e tempestuosa. Mas n?o faz a minima ideia de quem e o pai, da raz?o que levou a m?e a viver isolada do mundo com um nome inventado, nem de como alguma vez ira ter...

A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic-a personal and intellectual awakening A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire....

Inspired by a Jonathan Franzen essay, Emptying the Skies exposes the rampant poaching of endangered migratory songbirds in southern Europe and highlights the efforts of those risking their lives to stop this devastating environmental tragedy.

First published in 1988, Jonathan Franzen's debut novel takes us to St. Louis, Missouri--it is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in the mid-1980s, the story shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American...

This novel follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, as well as their close friends and lovers, as complex and troubled relationships unfold over many years. The book follows them through the last decades of the twentieth century and concludes near the beginning of the Obama administration. The Berglunds are the middle class suburban family that the neighbors just love to talk about. Walter, the successful and doting husband, and...