How to Be Alone: Essays
Where to buy How to Be Alone: Essays books online?
Product Description
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Now in How to be Alone, learn the personal narratives and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.
The audiobook How to be Alone features Franzen’s reading of a moving narrative of his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease (which won a National Magazine Award and has been reprinted around the world).
Although his essays range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each essay wrestles with essential themes of Franzen’s writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America.
Here, in 14 essays, are 14 fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a loud and distracting mass culture. These essays show the wry distrust of the claims of equipment and psychology, the like-despise relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.Amazon.com Review
Jonathan Franzen is smart and brash, the kind of person you want as your social critic but not as a brother-in-law. Many of the 14 essays in How to Be Alone, by the leader of the critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. A long, much-discussed rumination on the American novel, (newly) titled “Why Bother?,” is included, as well as essays on privacy obsession, the U.S. post office, New York City, huge tobacco, and new prisons. At his best, as in “My Father’s Brain,” a piece on his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, Franzen can make the ordinary world utterly riveting. But at times, it can be hard to discern where Franzen stands on any particular theme, as he regularly takes both sides of an argument. Valid attempts to reflect ambiguity s! ometimes lead to obfuscation, especially in his essays on privacy and tobacco, although his belief that tiny-town America of years gone by offered the individual small privacy certainly rings right. Franzen can write with panache, as in this comment after he watched, lacking headset, a TV show during a flight: “(It) became an exposé of the hydraulics of insincere smiles.” A few of the shorter pieces appear to be filler. Franzen shines brightest when he gets edgy and a small mad, as in “The Reader in Exile”: “As a replacement for of Manassas battlefield, a past theme park. As a replacement for of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. As a replacement for of a soul, membership in a crowd. As a replacement for of wisdom, data.” –Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca
Buy Cheap How to Be Alone: Essays Online
Related posts:
I read a excellent fleeting tale by Franzen in The New Yorker a couple years ago, but this book is lame, lame, lame. The essays contain small to no humor or insight- they are just lengthy, dull opinions on various subjects. Imagine if you can a duller, less-relavant Andy Rooney. If I wanted to read some loser’s uninspired musings, I would get on the internet and start reading weblogs. I hereby declare this book Unreadable.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This was my first reading of anything by Franzen.I selected this book up at the same time as I got “Corrections”.I chose to read this book first to get a feel for his work,but must admit was very disappointed.
I establish that trying to get anything out of these essays was like looking for a white dove in a snowstorm.Obviously,he believes he has what it takes to be a excellent novelist.Maybe he is well versed in the techniques of writing,but he doesnt seem to know what he wants to say to the reader.His essays seem to be an attempt at observation,but he can’t seem to pull his thoughts together and present a conclusion to the reader.
His concern about the literary novel going the way of the vinyl disc or the rotary phone,reminds me that it is the message not the medium that is vital.
Maybe he has establish his calling as a teacher of literary mechanics and should just place the writing of novels to the gifted who know what they want to say and have the fire in their belly to pursue that path.
In his last essay ,it appears he drifts somewhere between being liberal or socialist minded;and maybe that is the problem.He is not pleased with the way things are,doesn’t know what would satisfy him and can’t suggest any solution.Maybe he should start searching out some people who are positive,satisfied and successful.
Oh well,I guess I’ll still give “Corrections” a try.Let’s hope I like it better than this one.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
First off I’ll say that I like Franzen’s writing style and his dry sense of humor. The problem I had with this book is that because most of the essays were written in the mid to late 90s and all were written before 9/11, much of his observations have been rendered, in my opinion, obsolete. The world became a different place after 9/11 and the start of the war, etc. – and his observations on the zeitgeist, obviously, don’t reflect that change.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I establish the book extremely disappointing. The essays are neither personal enough to be engaging, nor deep enough to be intellectually stimulating. He talks about his personal life in such a detached and cold voice that even the pieces that had a potential of being extremely moving (like the one about his father) end up lifeless and just unadorned dull. I kept looking for something clever in the book, but as a replacement for the word “pseudo-intellectual” kept coming to my mind, as I could not find any depth to this writing.
Overall, I establish the tone of the book to be too whiny and missing in wit. A waste of my money.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book was written by the leader to cool his own mind about the validity of the modern novel. The essays were used as a way to massage his ego. We get it Jonathan, you reflect you’re fantastic, if only one tale didn’t try to infuse the reader with the fact that the leader is a fantastic one. He would speak of his faults, but all spun so positevely that you knew he didn’t really judge they were faults at all. This whole book read like an interview he was giving to the reader, to be accepted, and told he is a fantastic leader.
Fantastic title though.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5