Jonathan Franzen
1) Crossroads
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Key to all mythologies volume 1
Description
"It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social...
2) Freedom
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The story of Patty and Walter Berglund, a young, Midwestern couple, who start their promising life together with good intentions--wanting to be good partners, good parents, good neighbors, and good citizens. As time passes, however, the family they create loses its way, and the choices they make carry them into a future so at odds with the past that the differences seem irreconcilable.
3) Purity
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"A 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 has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have...
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"Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed." --US.Macmillan.com
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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
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Birders: The Central Park Effect reveals the extraordinary array of wild birds who grace Manhattan's celebrated patch of green, and the equally colorful New Yorkers who schedule their lives around the rhythms of migration. Author Jonathan Franzen, an idiosyncratic trombone technician, and a septuagenarian bird-tour leader are among the lively cast of characters in this charming, lyrical documentary that transports the viewer to the dazzling, hidden...
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A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic-a personal and intellectual awakening
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire....
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St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism,...
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The Discomfort Zone is Franzen's memoir of growth from his boyhood as a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a Midwestern middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s and a vivid personal history of an America turning its back on a certain idealism.
12) Ferrante fever
Description
"The world-hopping documentary Ferrante Fever journeys between New York City's cultural hub and Ferrante's native Italy, exploring how an anonymous author's visceral tales of love and friendship gained such an enthusiastic following. Hillary Clinton, Roberto Saviano, Jonathan Franzen and others weigh in on the Ferrante 'craze' and what makes her work--and her mysterious persona--so uniquely captivating." --container
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"Just one year after the climatologist James Hansen testified, in 1988, before a Senate committee that the Earth was warmer than it had ever been in recorded history--and that human consumption of fossil fuels was to blame--the New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered essay, "The End of Nature." At the time, the piece seemed to some speculative, even alarmist. Today it is considered a prescient, seminal work--explaining...
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"A one-of-a-kind celebration of America's greatest comic strip— and the life lessons it can teach us— from a stellar array of writers and artists. Over the span of fifty years, Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture— hilarious, poignant, inimitable. Some twenty years after the last strip appeared, the characters Schulz brought to life in Peanuts continue to resonate with millions...