Word: franzens
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This point was driven home to me during my sophomore year at Harvard, when a boy broke up with me by giving me a book of Jonathan Franzen essays called “How to be Alone.” Leaving aside the stereotypically Harvard gesture of giving a girl a book to let her down gently, there was something deeply offensive at the time about the assumption that I would be so devastated about our break-up that I would need to learn how to be alone. Yet despite the irrelevance of essays on dying fathers and big tobacco...
Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Daz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...
...relation between those who create art and those who critique it is notoriously fraught, something that was evident quickly to the standing-room only crowd in Sever Hall last night that watched novelist Jonathan Franzen face English professor James Wood, who has been one of his toughest critics. Wood, who is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, is noted for his censure of the postmodern social novel, which he termed the “contemporary American novel in its big triumphalist form” in a 2001 review of Franzen’s novel...
...Jonathan Franzen The Corrections Franzen had never been to Lithuania when he described it as a land of "chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings and a heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat." A Lithuanian ambassador took exception - and invited him for a visit...
...yourself). But I'm more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman...