Most Popular Books by Jonathan Franzen

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.

The National Book Award–winning author of Freedom presents a "multifaceted and revealing collection" of essays ( The Economist). 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. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen''s implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, Franzen doesn''t omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China''s economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day.

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.

‘His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph

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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

“A masterpiece of American fiction” Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times Book Review A novel from the author of The Corrections. This is the updated version of the text.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER *A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TOP TEN “A spellbinding novel” (People) from the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads, The Corrections is a comic, tragic epic of worlds colliding: an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions, a new world of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, 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. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself that, despite certain alarming indicators, he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man—or so her mother fears. 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.

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.

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.

《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。

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections 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. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

Strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion and literature. A hundred years ago, the writings of Viennese satirist Karl Kraus were among the most penetrating and prophetic in Europe--a relentless criticism of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though Kraus’s followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is. In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian/German writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to strongly voice unpopular opinions, and a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.