Franzen jonathan biography books are damaging society

Listen to the chapter here!

Jonathan Franzen:

Yeah, she was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. It's like, you're gonna lie for a living? That this was a portrait of an asshole. That Josef K. is a royal rövhål. Kids are not innocent little creatures.

It does seem a shame to spend a lot of time, when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books, to spend time reading crap.

Jonathan:

It's like, I'm alive when I'm writing a novel, and part of me is not really alive when I'm not.

Neil Pasricha:

I remember getting the knife. It was 10 years ago, Christmas 2013 or so, and I was trying to make the case to stuff a 576 page book into Leslie and I's carry-on bag before we went on a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family for a week over the Christmas holidays. She's like, you only have 100 pages left, are you sure you don't want to just read this when we get home?

And inom was like, I was so deep into reading The Corrections, and it

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Jonathan Franzen corrects himself

[F]or a moment, though I’m alone in bed with a book, I don’t feel alone. For a moment, I belong to a group neither as big as a statistically significant sample nor as small as the naked self. It’s a group of two, the faithful writer and the trusting reader. We’re different but the same.

-- “Books in Bed” from “How to Be Alone”

Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections,” won’t be joining you at your table. As the author who famously blindfolded himself to complete his acclaimed novel, distilling Proust’s cork-lined room to a bandage wrapped around his head to keep out the distractions, Franzen has a reputation for solitude. Even more famously, he dithered for several days in public and then spurned an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” after “The Corrections” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club.

Uncomfortable with the company at Winfrey’s televised dinner table, Franzen had finally refused to be cho

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The rise and fall and rise again of Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen, the novelist who has been lauded and reviled as few figures in contemporary American letters ever are, has a new book out. Which means it is time, once again, for one of the book world’s favorite pastimes: disseminating Jonathan Franzen thinkpieces.

Jonathan Franzen has flourished crankily under controversy since 2001, when two big things happened to him. First, he released his breakout novel The Corrections and became known as one of the most important American writers of his generation. Second, he said he was uncomfortable with Oprah selecting The Corrections for her book club because she’s picked a lot of schmaltz, and became synonymous with the worst of elitist white male snobbery.

Since then, Franzen has been named, variously, the Great American Novelist, a noted crank, a human Banksy installation, and simply kind of a prick. He has been embroiled in fights about Twitter (he says it i