Bad Neighbors
Walter and Patty Melted were the young products of Franzen Hill — the first dreadful characters to spit out of the misanthropic novelist’s mind since the old heart of The Twenty-Seventh City had fallen...
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Exclusive! Cover for Franzen’s Newest Novel!
(UPDATE: Ellen Wernecke also has a cover. Should there be a Photoshop contest or something?)
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Jonathan Franzen vs. Richard Stark: Which Writer Really “Knows” the World?
Sam Tanenhaus: “Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. Franzen...
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The Magnificent Ambersons (Modern Library #100)
(This is the first entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1.) By all reports, Booth Tarkington was hot shit sometime in...
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Solipsism is for Cowards. Go for Full-Fledged Hubris.
A couple of weeks ago, I replaced my 51-year-old Ego with a much more powerful Post-Dave Died of Boredom Hubris. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far my haughtiness had advanced in three...
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What Jonathan Franzen Didn’t Include in His New York Times Op-Ed
On May 28, 2011, The New York Times published a Jonathan Franzen op-ed “adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College. The piece contained a link to an audio version of...
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Thirty-Five Arguments Against Google Glass
Google Glass is a snazzy set of specs that will part the Red Sea if you tap it from the right angle. It aims to fuse smartphones and computers into a hands-free user experience more pleasurable than...
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Scarlett Thomas: The Unsung Hope for Ambitious Fiction
THE SEED COLLECTORS by Scarlett Thomas Canongate, 384 pages (UK only, unavailable in the United States) A little more than a decade ago, fiery ambitious fiction was in something of a crisis. Time-taxed...
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Shadow and Act (Modern Library Nonfiction #91)
(This is the tenth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library...
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