
	Where results make sense

Topic: Jonathan Franzen

Related Topics

Webster Groves, Missouri

16 In Webster Groves

Swarthmore College

Don DeLillo

Postmodernism

Joseph Heller

Ernest Hemingway

Gertrude Stein

William Faulkner

Mississippi River

	Powells.com Interviews - Jonathan Franzen
		Franzen settled into our living room above the Tenth Avenue streetcar line shortly before his reading to talk about his third novel, what it is and how it came to be.
		Franzen: It's as if you bring a person out on stage whose arms are full of personal belongings, then you begin to pile more on.
		Franzen: Right, but also Gary has the run-in with the hedge clippers, although things are so dark by that point in the chapter that perhaps it doesn't read quite as farcical.
	www.powells.com /authors/franzen.html (2871 words)

	Jonathan Franzen ★ Steven Barclay Agency
		When The Corrections was published in the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen was probably better known for his nonfiction than for the two novels he had already published.
		Jonathan Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), was a reimagination of his hometown, St. Louis, through the eyes of conspirators and terrorists from southern Asia.
		Franzen is also the author of a bestselling collection of essays, How to Be Alone and the memoir The Discomfort Zone.
	www.barclayagency.com /franzen.html (452 words)

	'How to Be Alone' by Jonathan Franzen
		Jonathan Franzen shot to fame a year ago with the publication of his third novel, "The Corrections." Acclaimed as one of the most important works of fiction in more than a decade, it was nominated for every major literary prize and won the National Book Award.
		Franzen often starts from a place of contradiction, whether admitting, in a scathing expose of the tobacco industry's suppressing research on the health hazards of nicotine, that he nevertheless smokes and enjoys it; or admitting that he craves the palpable comfort of the suburban mall, but prefers instead the anxiety of living in New York.
		Franzen turns his restless, wry intelligence to an array of subjects, from state-of-the-art prisons to the sex manual industry to the hopelessly dysfunctional Chicago Post Office, but the most powerful essays here are personal, Franzen mining his own ambivalence as a way to make larger arguments about the culture.
	www.post-gazette.com /books/reviews/20021215franzen1215fnp5.asp (737 words)

	Q&A Jonathan Franzen - The Boston Globe
		So when Franzen suddenly starts acting like an insolent child, zealously purging the house of the hundred-plus family snapshots his mother had spent years lovingly, obsessively hoarding, and skulks down to the basement to rip them from their frames, this reader, at least, was startled, but not put off.
		It's not that Franzen is a snob, as the Oprah dust-up made him out to be (is there anyone who doesn't remember Franzen's conflicted reaction to the news that Oprah's Book Club had selected ``The Corrections"?), or a ``mean-spirited Lucy on steroids," as Kakutani accuses after reading his chapter on the Peanuts comic strip.
		FRANZEN: ``The Discomfort Zone" is a postwar American memoir in which nothing traumatic and certainly nothing remotely world-historical happens, so you can't relax in the arms of the powerful drama that was my childhood.
	www.boston.com /news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/01/qa_jonathan_franzen (1230 words)

	Franzen, Jonathan Criticism and Essays
		While Franzen's work is commonly held in high esteem, the author has managed to garner significant controversy in the last ten years for his resolute convictions about publishing, writing, and the direction of American tastes.
		Franzen and Cornell spent the next few years dedicating themselves to the creation and enjoyment of literature, an existence Franzen generally characterizes as nearly idyllic despite their difficult financial situation.
		Franzen apologized for misrepresenting his intent in interviews, claiming that he was unaccustomed to the level of attention that came with being recognized by Winfrey.
	www.enotes.com /contemporary-literary-criticism/franzen-jonathan (1782 words)

	How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of) - TIME
		You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come on her show.
		Franzen grew up nerdy and nervous in a small, comfortable town in Missouri called Webster Groves.
		Here are a few things that young Jonathan was afraid of, according to The Discomfort Zone: "spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls," and most of all, "my parents." When he wasn't afraid, Franzen was embarrassed.
	www.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229130,00.html (680 words)

	New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen: This week Jonathan Franzen
		Although it is stupid to treat fiction as autobiography, Franzen's memoir all but announces that his mother inspired Enid Lambert in The Corrections, the matriarch frustrated equally by her unhappy marriage and the refusal of her children to abide by her conservative values.
		Franzen heard his father swear only once, and that was to say, "Damn!" His mother was desperate to be a part of the rest of the respectable community: "all her life she hated not belonging".
		Franzen can be long-winded, but at his best he produces writing you remember when you need it - that stands by you when you're in trouble - and it has made him a very wealthy man.
	www.newstatesman.com /200610160034 (1887 words)

	A Book, an Author, and a Talk Show Host - Some Notes on the Oprah-Franzen Debacle
		Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was a novel that arrived, in the fall of 2001, with a great deal of "hype".
		Franzen's two previous books, The Twenty-Seventh City (see our review) and Strong Motion (see our review) were similarly massive tomes, and though their publication was not preceded by quite the same amount of hype they did receive a great deal of media attention and review coverage.
		Franzen was on his Corrections-book-tour in late September, and, when he had a day off in St. Louis, arrangements were made to film some of the background material that would be shown on Oprah.
	www.complete-review.com /quarterly/vol3/issue1/oprah.htm (1855 words)

	James Campbell: The Case of Jonathan Franzen
		The compromise, as Franzen understood straight away, involved permitting his novel, and himself, to be adopted by a book club which is part of a project, a concept, that epitomizes everything in "the culture" he ought to be against.
		Franzen is good on both outward and inward states: the language, which is never dull, has the utmost grip on the characters' inner experience, and, additionally, the self-consciousness developing from it—the experience of experience.
		Franzen imagined this character, in present-day time (i.e., 1995–6), "kicking in the screen of his bedroom TV," as he resiled from "the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse…[the] media jingoism." However, Franzen believed that such an act would be in vain.
	www.bostonreview.net /BR27.2/campbell.html (3250 words)

	JONATHAN FRANZEN & THE NEA
		No, no, no, his supporters insist — the fact that Jonathan Franzen goes public with his walking thumb act at the same time that he just happens to have a new book out is merely an amazing coincidence.
		Franzen had applied for the award, supposedly intended to help struggling writers, after signing his million–dollar contract for the book and movie versions of "The Corrections." What's more, his good friend Rick Moody had been on the judging panel.
		Franzen, as is his wont, then immediately went into spin control for himself, which is to say he called Page Six reporter Ian Spiegelman and began the work of digging the hole deeper by changing his story.
	www.mobylives.com /Franzen_NEA.html (833 words)

	Readers for Jonathan Franzen
		Jonathan Franzen, well-known author of The Corrections and most recently The Discomfort Zone, spent the day at the college interviewing, leading a QandA in Trumbower 130 for those enrolled in the class and performing a reading in the Miller Forum from his memoir, also the subject of study for the Living Writers class.
		Watching Jonathan Franzen is not a comfortable experience—it would take a serious effort on the part of any viewer to “zone out” and fall into a lulled consciousness.
		Jonathan Franzen is not a writer alone; he is an intellect, an apt and willing thinker of art and popular conceptions of art.
	www.muhlenbergadvocate.com /articles/F_Sidoti_Franzen.htm (999 words)

	Meteoric success a novel experience for author Jonathan Franzen (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Franzen treats the flawed Lamberts more with respect than scorn, which is why the two parents and their three children come across as real people and why what happens to them exerts an increasing hold on the attention and the emotions of readers.
		Franzen's aim is true on a vast catalog of excesses indulged in by American society and culture.
		Franzen's prodigious talents are their own worst enemy, with some too-lengthy passages that becalm the narrative flow.
	seattlepi.nwsource.com /books/41634_franzen06.shtml (1215 words)

	BBC News \| ARTS \| Franzen 'regrets' Oprah row
		Jonathan Franzen is as well known now for his spat with talk show host Oprah Winfrey as he is for his literature.
		Franzen and Winfrey fell out last year after the author was publicly reluctant to allow his book, The Corrections, to be named as book of the month for Winfrey's book club.
		Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/entertainment/arts/1766945.stm (521 words)

	Jonathan Franzen at AllExperts
		Jonathan Franzen (born August 17, 1959, Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist and essayist, currently living in New York City.
		Franzen was raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St.
		Franzen was, at the time, willing to participate in the selection, appearing in B-roll footage in his hometown of St. Louis (described in How To Be Alone's essay "Meet Me In St. Louis") and sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah.
	en.allexperts.com /e/j/jo/jonathan_franzen.htm (473 words)

	Jonathan Franzen \| Official Site \| Author of The Discomfort Zone, The Corrections, How to Be Alone, Twenty-Seventh ...
		Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness.Franzen's version of the text—for so long poorly served in English—is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this unrelentingly tragic play.
		An intimate memoir of Franzen's growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
		As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance -- even a celebration -- of being a reader and a writer."
	www.jonathanfranzen.com /books.htm (213 words)

	Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine
		Marcus especially critiques a 1996 Franzen piece in The New Yorker called "Shouts and Murmurs," where the author receives a mysterious package from a presumed Unabomber-like entity called "FC2" before ultimately discovering the mailing to be from the Fiction Collective 2, a small press of great respect in the experimental and academic communities.
		He effectively demonstrates Franzen's "straw man" punching bag: that ambitious literature is needlessly complex and that its practitioners are obsessed with what Franzen calls "Status" (an author-centered position) rather than "Contract" (a reader-centered stance).
		If Franzen's primary gripe was an argument merely for his personal pleasure in a certain type of literature, then the damage would be merely idiosyncratic.
	www.electronicbookreview.com /thread/criticalecologies/nonnarrative (2942 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Entertainment \| Arts \| Franzen warns political writers
		Franzen shot to fame with The Corrections, his third novel, focused on the saga of an American family being brought together to celebrate Christmas.
		The book was a massive hit, although Franzen then sparked controversy when he refused to allow it to be selected by Oprah Winfrey as her Book Of The Month, arguing that to do so implied endorsement for both him and her.
		Franzen added he found these feelings made him realise he was alive, and would prompt him to write eight or 10 words down - "something to start with the next morning".
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/entertainment/arts/4086703.stm (621 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: The Discomfort Zone, by Jonathan Franzen, Hardcover
		A not very popular, bookish kid, Franzen (The Corrections) and his high school buddies, in one of the book's most memorable episodes, attempt to loop a tire, ring-toss-style, over their school's 40-foot flag pole as part of a series of flailing pranks.
		Franzen watches his older brother storm out of the house toward a wayward hippe life, while he ultimately follows along his father's straight-and-narrow path.
		Franzen traces back to his teenage years the roots of his enduring trouble with women, his pursuit of a precarious career as a writer and his recent life-affirming obsession with bird-watching.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?ISBN=0374299196&z=y&cds2Pid=9481 (863 words)

	Making the World Safe for Jonathan Franzen
		Jonathan Franzen is a gifted novelist whose last novel, The Corrections, could have used an editor who was unafraid to blue pencil the baggier prose that particular novel contained.
		Franzen is a worry wart at heart, one who loves to fret about his own comfort, and it's too his credit that he's a splendid enough writer, most of the time, to make us care about the status of his nerves colliding with the world.
		Franzen, a novelist of ideas no less than those he critiques as too heady and thereby dangerous --DeLillo, William Gaddis-- seemed to be one of the smart one of those writers who felt compelled to make the readers labor for the treasure embedded in his books.
	tedburke2.tripod.com /jonathan_franzen.html (997 words)

	BookPage Interview October 2001: Jonathan Franzen
		Franzen had also recently published a lengthy, controversial essay in Harper's magazine lamenting the sorry state of contemporary literary fiction.
		Franzen says the turning point, the moment when the old Corrections pointed toward the new, came when he wrote the "At Sea" section of the novel.
		As the two interact with their fellow passengers and lurch toward private catastrophes, Franzen presents their lives in ways that are both chilling and hilarious.
	www.bookpage.com /0110bp/jonathan_franzen.html (994 words)

	Salon.com Books \| Book lovers' quarrel
		Franzen, who had been traveling across country on a tour to promote "The Corrections," had left behind a trail of remarks made to members of the press asking how he felt to have his new novel chosen by the talk show host.
		Franzen has apologized and clarified, blamed his own inexperience in handling the media and attributed his reservations to not wanting to see a "corporate logo" on the cover of his book -- but it will be difficult for him to erase the impression that snobbishness caused him to diss Winfrey.
		Jonathan Franzen talks about the medicalization of love and loss, the charms of Narnia and living in an America where no one grows up.
	archive.salon.com /books/feature/2001/10/26/franzen_winfrey (1329 words)

	The Nature Conservancy in New York - Author Jonathan Franzen to Discuss His Bird Problem in Public
		In it, Franzen links birdwatching to his reluctant concern for the environment, and then to his collapsing marriage, and later his love for a woman who did not want his children.
		The Discomfort Zone is Franzen’s intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
		This unique presentation with Jonathan Franzen is part of The Nature Conservancy’s public events and outreach initiative in New York, which is designed to engage Conservancy members and supporters in the Tri-State area.
	www.nature.org /wherewework/northamerica/states/newyork/press/press2688.html (380 words)

	Bitch \| O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Contemporary Women's Fiction by ...
		Franzen and his ilk get points for the intellectual exercise of dissecting contemporary culture, while Proulx, however distinguished, is credited with the emotional sensitivity required to create complex characters; for critics like Eakin, it seems, Franzen is from Mars and Proulx is from Venus.
		The problem isn’t Franzen’s use of some inescapably “tribal” form, or even his attempt to merge that form with the novel of sweeping social commentary—after all, borrowing, merging, and morphing forms has been the name of the game since the novel’s birth in the 1600s.
		Given that Franzen let himself in for a host of middlebrow, “tribal” associations by merging boy-pomo and girl-family-saga forms, it’s perhaps no surprise that he seemed to want nothing more than to pry those worlds back apart, to retreat to a zone where clear divisions between high and low were intact.
	www.bitchmagazine.com /archives/02_02franzen/franzen.shtml (2531 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, Paperback, REPRINT
		Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism.
		Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy.
		Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture -- our culture.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0312421273&z=y (1595 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)