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Join NOW!Jonathan Franzen is an avid bird lover, as anyone who read Freedom might have guessed. Two weeks ago, Franzen wrote a piece for the New Yorker that, among other things, condemned the Audubon Society for focusing too much on climate change and not enough on conservation, the society’s original mission. Focusing on climate change is […]
...more“Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and the consent of the governed built in,” Wallace wrote in an email to his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, in 2007. “For me it’s a bit like math: I have no talent for it […]
...moreAt Booth, Susan Lerner interviews Jonathan Franzen about a range of subjects including the influence of the YA novel, social media, and the different “forms of exploration” associated with essays and fiction. On the latter subject Franzen says: I think fiction is the genre better suited to exploration. Essay is reporting, in a sense. There are […]
...more…our Franzen problems, these days, are pretty minor. We don’t have to worry that Chip Lambert’s hand-wringing is going to reinforce the old, realist modes of romantic reaction. But we do have to worry about what happens to attempts to resist those modes. Power has not merely untoothed the language of the avant-garde, it has […]
...moreMy aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm. Not only was I seasick, I saw the population on board as hostile competitors to salvation. As the ferry lurched and rolled, we gave one another dirty […]
...moreJonathan Franzen will release another sweeping narrative titled Purity in September of next year, to the edification of serious intellectuals nationwide. While Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi promises a “multigenerational American epic” that will deal with the ambitious subject matter Franzen is known for, the novel’s “mythic undertone” may be an interesting departure […]
...moreThe literature of Alzheimer’s is a cavern unexplored, but Stefan Merrill Block does his best for the New Yorker: Nearly every novel I’ve read that attempts to depict the internal experience of Alzheimer’s also attempts to fit the disease’s retrogenic symptoms to one sort of sentimental trope: a reckoning with a repressed or unacknowledged truth […]
...moreAt The Millions, Tracy O’Neill deconstructs the Ritz-Carlton’s new “Six Word Wows” ad campaign. The hotel chain calls for guests to describe their stay in six words or less, using the hashtag #RCMemories, and claims to be ““Paying Homage to a Classic Ernest Hemingway Line.” O’Neill frames her essay with Thomas Frank’s assertion that, since the mid-90s, […]
...moreIn an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by the demands of a family life whose quotidian challenges, having monopolized her time, become central concerns in her work. Her assumed privilege garners little sympathy […]
...more(n.) a neighbor whose house is on fire; from the Ancient Greek character Ucalegon, an Elder of Troy whose house was set on fire by the Achaeans when they invaded the city. Accomack is a small county that looked half-gutted even before the fire started, where love and fire could combine to transform two ordinary […]
...moreSaturday 3/29: Courtney Zoffness, Marin Gazzaniga, Lisa Dierbeck, Marian Fontana read as part of the Brooklyn Writers Space series. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Joe Meno, Carl Phillips, and Simone White read at the Washington Square issue launch party. Meno’s Office Girl (2012) follows two young people enduring together millennial angst. NYU Creative Writing House, 7 […]
...moreFlavorwire’s Jason Diamond insists that writers can eschew New York City in favor of greener pastures, offering a comprehensive defense of Franzen country: A closer look at the literary map of the 50 states reveals that even if the publishing industry writ large is situated in New York and Los Angeles, some of the most exciting things going […]
...moreNovelist Jennifer Weiner has long been an outspoken critic of literary sexism, vocally demanding respect for herself and other female authors and pushing back against stodgy heavyweights like Jonathan Franzen. But how much dismissal of Weiner can be attributed to contempt for women’s issues, and how much can be attributed to the fact that her […]
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If you enjoyed Timothy Leo Taranto’s first and second rounds of literary puns, check out these new illustrations of such essential authors as Juneau Díaz and Karen Mussel
...moreMonday 12/9: Author Jonathan Franzen comes to the Bookshop Santa Cruz to discuss and sign copies of his new book,The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus. Free, 7 p.m. Tuesday 12/10: InsideStorytime THE FIX features Joe Clifford (Junkie Love), Zarina Zabrisky (We, Monsters), Roy Mash (Buyer’s Remorse), Emily Meg Weinstein (Lake Celeste or the Joy […]
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I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one of them, you might start here. In 2004, Jonathan Franzen made an appeal in The New York Times […]
...moreAt The New Yorker festival this weekend, Jonathan Franzen and Clay Shirky set out to answer the question: Is technology good for culture? Reflecting on the afternoon discourse, John McDermott of The Awl writes: “Technology does not necessarily advance or diminish people’s lives. Technology is an extension of life itself: it can be as lonely […]
...moreHere’s a different kind of year-end book list: for the New York Times, Sam Anderson looks back at the notes he left in his reading material during 2012. Have you scribbled any memorable marginalia in your own books this year? Transcribe some for us in the comments!
...moreWhy review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question. Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing “death” of the book review is perhaps a more nuanced process than it first appears: “Perhaps a large problem in the decline of good criticism […]
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Bibliophysicists now speculate that no less than three parallel versions of Jonathan Franzen can coexist at any given moment, and the variant, some say, could be much higher. This assortment of Franzens—and how readers interpret them—can make an impartial reading of his work problematic. The fifty-three-year-old novelist exists, first, as one of America’s most celebrated […]
...moreWhen I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
...moreAt Salon, David Daley argues that “Jonathan Franzen and the Web will never get along.” Daly points us to an anecdote in Franzen’s “On Autobiographical Fiction” in contending that both the author and his critics are misinterpreting and talking past each other. “Maybe Franzen is actually the successful writer who knows exactly what he wants to […]
...moreOver the past couple weeks, Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton has incited a number of responses. At The Daily Beast, Marina Budhos examines why Franzen took such a “tortuous and offensive back door route” to find sympathy for Wharton, instead of “exploring empathy” for an author who, she argues, faced similar writerly preoccupations […]
...moreIn this Awl piece, Michelle Dean weighs in on Jonathan Franzen’s declaration that David Foster Wallace “fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces.” The article looks back at Wallace’s statements about his nonfiction, and discusses both “the Franzen paradox” and the dynamics of the “Wallace-Franzen friendship.” “In a faint echo […]
...moreWhen you’re playing host for your literary idol, there is a lot of opportunity for panic and embarrassment. Wendy MacLeod recounts Jonathan Franzen’s visit to Kenyon, recalling her anticipatory anxieties, how to avoid sending out stalker-ish vibes, and what it’s like to be acutely aware of dining room acoustics.
...moreJonathan Franzen dispensed some optimistic guidance in a NY Times Op-Ed essay, an adaptation of his recent commencement speech to Kenyon graduates. He covers techno-consumerism, the environmentalist anger that once confined him to his room and his bird-watching revelation that assuaged his real life qualms. You even find out about his recent Blackberry upgrade. He […]
...moreEllen Meeropol’s debut novel tackles bizarre cult rituals, political violence, drug abuse, infanticide, and the Klan.
...more“I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these […]
...moreTwo recent books by Asian American writers confront stereotypes while exploring the rich interiority of the characters’ lives.
...moreThis week in New York Colm Tólbín brings Henry James to us, Furnace Press Decomposes, Jonathan Franzen returns home, Sex workers share their family tales, Myla Goldberg gets crafty, Classic cocktails, classic film, Comic and Graphics Fest goes to church, poetry touches on wartime, and Free in ART.
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