Word: franzen
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Last year's fiction winner, Denis Johnson's 624-page Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), for example, was a critical darling and Pulitzer finalist, that, like those first NBA winners, failed to top bestseller lists. And in 2001, Jonathan Franzen, winner of the fiction award for his 500-page work The Corrections, bristled at being chosen for Oprah's Book Club a month prior, inciting calls of elitism from other writers. But the foundation has recognized some household names in its past: Oprah Winfrey herself received a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1999, as did horror...
...everyone agrees. After Winfrey picked Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections in 2001, the author said he had never seen her show and the thought of his book having "that logo of corporate ownership on it" dismayed him. "[S]he's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe," said Franzen at the time. Winfrey's reaction was swift: she rescinded an invitation for Franzen to appear on her show. (The Corrections stayed in the club; Franzen, chastened perhaps by his publisher, thanked Oprah in his acceptance speech when the novel won the National Book Award...
...talk show host said Franzen "was not even a blip on the radar screen of my life," although by 2003, she switched from picking contemporary books to classic titles, including John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Gabriel Garcí]a Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Winfrey's picks boosted sales: Penguin ordered 800,000 more copies of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina after the 19th-Century Russian novel got the nod. But much of the publishing industry was dismayed at missing the chance to hitch their latest books - and their profits - to Oprah's train...
...pleasure lies in the piquancy of the writer-state pairings. Some are more obvious--heavy hitter Jonathan Franzen handles New York. Some are less so--imagine the editors' relief when they remembered that Jhumpa Lahiri hails from tiny Rhode Island (which, as she points out, is not an island!). There's something about their home state that puts writers in confessional moods. Picture Anthony Bourdain lighting M-80s ("It's a quarter stick a dynamite!!") as a j.d. in Jersey or a teenage Joshua Ferris cruising the canals of Florida with Jimmy Buffett (at the time he didn't know...
...required solitude, for time away from Facebook and final clubs, alone in a basement, listening to screeching saxophones and melancholy chords. So here I sit, playing jazz and talking to no one (no one I can see anyway). And while it may not be the exactly what Jonathan Franzen was thinking of, I can safely say that I now know how to be alone...