Word: franzens
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...comic squalors of cruise-ship travel and the shenanigans of global capitalism. It also has language that builds in powerful, rolling strides. And it has characters, the separately unraveling Lamberts, who get very deeply under your skin. So who can blame the amiable and soft-spoken author, Jonathan Franzen, if he sounds a little cheeky these days? "You can get a million people to read your book in this country," he says. "It's not a tiny audience for fiction. It's not chamber music...
...even while he says this you can see the doubts digging tunnels under his composure. Because this, after all, is the same Jonathan Franzen who nine years ago was almost ready to call it quits as a fiction writer, figuring that not only was he at the end of his rope but so was the novel in general. When his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he was just 29. The intricate tale of a vengeful woman hired from Bombay to become police chief of St. Louis, Mo., it got good reviews and decent sales...
...book courses through the sorrows of marriage, the black comedies of sex, the mental chaos of old age and the surreal misfortunes of free-market Lithuania? What if it boasts some of the most lustrous writing of any novel in years? What we're asking is whether Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (Farrar Straus; 528 pages; $26) will become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes. The season's other anticipated novels include The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer, Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende, Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul...
...EGADS, EGAN: "I know that everyone is talking about Jonathan Franzen this fall, but don?t you need a female voice as a counterpoint?" asks a publicist at Doubleday. The female voice she has in mind is that of novelist and short story writer Jennifer Egan, whose second novel, "Look at Me," will be published by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday on September 18. Egan has a lot going for her: superagent Binky Urban, a 15-city reading tour, and confirmed coverage in Vogue, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, O, Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, Talk, Paper, Vanity Fair and the NYT Book Review...
Systems providers also change the way cars are designed. "First, the existence of these suppliers speeds up the development of the components themselves," Franzen says. "If you are a car manufacturer and design your own seats, you will probably have a new generation of seats every 10 or 15 years. But if you go to a megasupplier, it will probably have eight seat generations in parallel development at any given time. This leads to the second big advantage: it frees up engineers to concentrate on the things that make the designs unique because they don't have...