Best Selling Books by Jonathan Franzen

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Freedom, by the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire. Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury? Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The highly anticipated new novel from one of our greatest living writers. It''s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem''s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has veered into the era''s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the centre. By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years. Jonathan Franzen''s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

Musings on postmodern America by the National Book Award–winning author: "Why be alone? For the pleasure of reading books such as this." — Entertainment Weekly How to Be Alone is a powerful collection of nonfiction by the New York Times–bestselling author of novels including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads. While the essays range in subject matter from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each one wrestles with the essential themes of Jonathan Franzen''s writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity; and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. "[Franzen] focuses on the growing commercialism and alienation . . . Presenting a number of variations on that theme, he addresses such personal topics as his smoking habit, an interview for the Oprah show, and his father''s battle with Alzheimer''s, a poignant account of the disease''s impact on his family. In addition, pieces on the shortcomings of the Chicago post office, the supermax prison in Colorado, and the isolating effects of an increasingly computerized society show Franzen''s skill as a journalist and social critic. Also included is ''Why Bother?,'' a revision of his 1996 critique of the American novel . . . penetrating yet entertaining social commentary." — Library Journal "Intelligent, thoughtful and provocative pieces." — Publishers Weekly "Although Franzen calls them ''essays'' many of these pieces are reportage. He''s good at it . . . He goes out on many a limb (as essayists should) and gives us a good many things to think about, such as the blurring line between private and public behavior in the age of the 24-hour news cycle." — Minneapolis Star-Tribune "An intellectually engaging self-awareness as formidable as Joan Didion''s." — New York Times "Do good books matter anymore? This one does." — Time

Sample Text

In "Farther Away, " which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him.

A New York Times bestselling 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 chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she''ll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn''t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters--Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers--and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

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. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom’s characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes'' cause complicate everything.

St. Louis is embroiled in a political conspiracy after Jammu, a young woman from India, is installed as its new police chief. To succeed she realizes that respected businessman Martin Probst must be seduced or destroyed.

《纠正》 After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband is losing his sanity to Parkinson''s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home 伊妮德·兰伯特，当了五十年的妻子和母亲之后，准备让自己享受一下快乐。不幸的是，她的丈夫，艾尔弗雷德罹患帕金森症，逐渐精神失常。他们的孩子也早已飞出了家庭的小巢，奔向各自生活的悲剧。 大儿子加里，银行的投资经理、居家男人，正努力说服自己和家人他没有临床抑郁症——尽管各方面证据相反；二儿子奇普，因性丑闻失去了高校的稳定工作，处于半失业状态，指望着靠手头的剧本赚钱；三女儿丹妮丝年轻美貌，逃离了惨淡的婚姻，成了纽约高级餐厅的主厨，却与一位已婚男性有染——至少她母亲如此怀疑。 尽管情势看起来无比绝望，伊妮德却意志坚定，她要纠正一切的错误，享受全家人的最后一次圣诞欢聚。

The award-winning author of Freedom examines topics like the future of the planet, public discourse, and himself in this provocative essay collection. The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like "a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them." For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Whatever his subject, Franzen''s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own feelings. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason. Praise for The End of the End of the Earth "Feels carefully crafted around a central concern: ''How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end?'' . . . Franzen proves himself up to the challenge of the essay as a form, as ''something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative,'' and of a subject so vast and important that it affects us all. Ignore the tweets, read the book." — Financial Times "The work of a writer at the top of his game—limber and lovely, delivering deep insights with delicacy and grace." — The Guardian

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.