Bøker av Jonathan Franzen

The climate crisis is here. Our chance to stop it has come and gone, but this doesn't have to mean the world is ending.

The new novel from the author of The Corrections.Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outre rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "e;a very different kind of neighbour,"e; an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

From the author of 'Freedom', a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes.After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred's condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas.Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, 'The Corrections' confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.

Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of 'The Corrections'.Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst 'The Corrections' was the best-loved and most written-about novel the previous decade. 'How to be Alone', is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen's controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. From the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, from his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease to a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author, each piece wrestles with Franzen's familiar themes: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern imperial America.These collected 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.' They voice a wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.

Det er 23. desember 1971 og Hildebrandt-familien står ved en korsvei. Vi følger dem mens de navigerer de siste femti års kryssende politiske, intellektuelle og sosiale strømninger. Hver av medlemmene av familien søker en type frihet som hver av de andre truer med å begrense. Korsveien er en ny, stor roman av Jonathan Franzen, satt til en tid i moralsk krise.

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. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The CorrectionsYoung 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 chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world - including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.Jonathan Franzen's Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew." In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in CrossroadsIt'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 queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

Siden gjennombruddet med Korrigeringer i 2001, har Jonathan Franzen seilet opp som en av de viktigste, amerikanske forfatterne i sin generasjon. Han er også en skarp essayist. I Slutten på jordens ende, spenner han opp et bredt lerret. Selv om temaene er store og varierte, går klimaangsten som en tråd gjennom flere av essayene: Hvordan skal vi finne mening i en verden på kanten av økologisk krise, der sjansene for å snu blir stadig mindre?Essayene i denne samlingen er velskrevne, presise, undersøkende og ofte morsomt sørgmodige. Franzen skriver om gamle og brutte vennskap; om kapitalisme og teknologiskepsis; om fotografi og litteratur. Ved flere anledninger, skriver han også om sin fascinasjon for fugler, og mismotet over fremtiden som venter dem. Likevel er det aksept, ikke resignasjon, som er betegnende for disse essayene - enten det dreier seg om klima eller brutte vennskap. Som alltid benytter Franzen sin særegne evnen til å finne små detaljer fra hverdagen, utsette dem for sitt granskende blikk, og vise frem noe slående allment i det partikulære. Slutten på jordens ende rommer essay om det vi deler, tingene som forener oss, eller tingene som har potensial til å gjøre det.

Renhet er fortellingen om en ung kvinnes leting etter faren hun aldri har møtt og hvordan jakten på faren driver henne inn i kraftfeltet til en karismatisk varsler og lovløs internetthelt. Pip Tyler vet ikke hvem hun er. Hippiemoren hennes har aldri villet fortelle hvem som er faren. Alt hun vil si er at han er farlig. Så farlig at moren har kuttet alle bånd til fortiden, fått ny identitet og lever avsondret i en liten by i California. Pip har en jobb hun avskyr og får sparken fra, hun er forelsket i en gift mann som ikke vil ha henne, ikke en gang etter at kona hans har stukket av med en annen fyr, og hun har studielån, et stort studielån. Pip trenger noen svar. Og hvem er bedre utstyrt til å gi henne alle de rette svarene enn den tyske fredsaktivisten Annagret. Hun setter Pip i kontakt med bevegelsen The Sunlight Project, og den karismatiske lederen og varsleren, Andreas Wolf, som har asyl i Bolivia. Pip trenger hjelp for å finne sin egentlige identitet. Wolf kan hjelpe henne, men hvorfor han er så interessert i akkurat henne forstår hun ikke. Alt hun vet er at intensiteten i forholdet mellom dem setter hennes konvensjonelle syn på rett og galt i spill. Renhet er en bok om hemmeligheter; om hemmelige tjenester, statshemmeligheter, forretningshemmeligheter, men først og fremst om kraften i de hemmelighetene vi har for hverandre i familien. Det handler om hemmeligheter som binder oss sammen og styrer følelsene våre. Det er en mørk komedie om ungdommelig idealisme, ekstrem trofasthet og mord. Om gode og dårlige foreldre, journalister og varslere, om det allestedsnærværende internettet og den eldgamle kampen mellom kjønnene.

Intelligent, humoristisk og ettertenksomt, et skarpt blikk på amerikansk samtid. Essays av en av vår tids viktigste forfattere.Jonathan Franzens Frihet ble en av de største suksessene verden hadde sett på lenge da den kom ut i 2010. Det er en ambisiøs og seriøs roman om moral, om å være menneske, om å leve i USA i det 21-århundrede. Men i tillegg til å være en av landets fremste forfattere av skjønnlitteratur er Jonathan Franzen et politisk menneske med sterke meninger, meninger som ofte kommer til uttrykk gjennom essayene han skriver. I Lenger unna har han samlet et knippe essays og taler som er skrevet i løpet av de siste fem årene. Han skriver om emner som har opptatt ham lenge. Fugletitting, selvmord, kommunikasjon - i denne samlingen følger vi en forfatter som aldri er redd for å gå i nærkamp med seg selv, med egne holdninger til litteratur, politikk, relasjoner. Det har ført til en bemerkelsesverdig, provoserende og helt nødvendig bok.

Patty og Walter Berglund har lenge vært en pryd for nabolaget i Barrier Street, men nå har fasaden begynt å slå sprekker. Tenåringssønnen har flyttet inn til naboene, Walter, tidligere advokat med miljøspørsmål som spesialfelt, har begynt å jobbe i kullindustrien, og kona Patty har forvandlet seg til naboen fra helvete.

I denne boken skriver Jonathan Franzen om minner fra sin egen barndom. Vi følger ham gjennom en oppvekst med konstant flau overfølsomhet, som en del av kristne ungdomsfellesskap på syttitallet og til den voksne mannens sterke lidenskaper. Resultatet er et portrett av en mann, hans familie og vår tid.

Etter nesten 50 år som kone og mor, er Enid Lambert klar for litt moro. Uheldigvis lider mannen hennes av Parkinsons, og barna har forlatt hjemmet for lenge siden. Den eldste, Gary, forsøker å overbevise både kona si og seg selv om at han ikke er deprimert. Den mellomste, Chip, har mistet sin tilsynelatende trygge akademiske stilling, og mislykkes med sine nye prosjekter. Og Denise, den yngste, har forlatt et ødeleggende ekteskap bare for å kaste bort sin ungdom på en affære med en gift mann. Det er i hvertfall det Enid frykter. Desperat etter å få noe hyggelig å se fram til, bestemmer Enid seg for å samle hele familien til en siste jul hjemme.

A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of 'The Corrections'.Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of 'Freedom' and the highly acclaimed 'The Corrections', arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. 'The Discomfort Zone' is his 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. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals.He tells of the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.Sparkling, daring and arrestingly honest, 'The Discomfort Zone' is warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction. It narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.

A GREAT AMERICAN WRITER'S CONFRONTATION WITH A GREAT EUROPEAN CRITIC-A PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL AWAKENINGA hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but also annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America. Interwoven with Franzen's survey of today's cultural and technological landscape is an intensely personal recollection of the author's first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Purity, Freedom and The Corrections

The critically acclaimed first novel from Jonathan Franzen, author of the prize winning and internationally bestselling, `The Corrections'.

The critically acclaimed second novel from the author of 'The Corrections'.

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 prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In 'The Kraus Project', Franzen not only presents and annotates his definitive new translations of Kraus, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. In Franzen Kraus has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, 'The Kraus Project' is a feast of thought, passion and literature.

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a collection of essays that reveal him to be one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social criticsWhile the essays in this collection range in subject matter from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each one wrestles with the essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity; and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the fate of the American novel in what became known as "the Harper's essay," as well as his award-winning narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

A new edition of the provocative New York Times bestseller that influenced a generation, with a new introduction by Jonathan Franzen and an afterword by the author