The Corrections Picador USA Sep 2002 isbn: 0312421273 $15.00 buy How To Be Alone: Essays Farrar,Starus & Giroux Oct 2002 isbn: 0374173273 $24.00 buy

Jonathan Franzen, September 24

Tuesday, 6pm
Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall
700 Boylston Street, Boston free and open to public

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to Be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.