Jonathan Franzen

"A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom. 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 has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have...

"Masterful describes not only Jonathan Franzen's latest novel but also David Ledoux's reading of the book . . . Ledoux gives a vibrant performance." —AudioFile Magazine
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation.

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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 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....

Birders: The Central Park Effect reveals the extraordinary array of wild birds who grace Manhattan's celebrated patch of green, and the equally colorful New Yorkers who schedule their lives around the rhythms of migration. Author Jonathan Franzen, an idiosyncratic trombone technician, and a septuagenarian bird-tour leader are among the lively cast of characters in this charming, lyrical documentary that transports the viewer to the dazzling, hidden...

St. Louis, Missouri, 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 mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism,...

"First performed under heavy censorship in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's play closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid public outrage and charges of obscenity. The play's content was radical indeed: teenage sex, suicide, abortion, masturbation, sadomasochism. But even more radical was the unsentimental and brutally authentic comedy with which Wedekind treated it. The story traces the dawning sexual awareness of four teenagers, Melchior,...

Franzen presents new translations and annotations of the work of early twentieth-century satirist Karl Kraus, who, via his self-published magazine Die Fackel, "attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire"--Dust jacket flap.

For the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth: her three greatest novels, in a couture-inspired deluxe edition featuring a new introduction by Jonathan Franzen
Born into a distinguished New York family, Edith Wharton chronicled the lives of the wealthy, the well born, and the nouveau riches in fiction that often hinges on the collision of personal passion and social convention. This volume brings together her best-loved novels, all...