Free Download Books How to Be Alone

Be Specific About Containing Books How to Be Alone

Title	:	How to Be Alone
Author	:	Jonathan Franzen
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 306 pages
Published	:	October 1st 2003 by Picador (first published October 1st 2002)
Categories	:	Writing. Essays. Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Short Stories

How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen

Paperback | Pages: 306 pages

Rating: 3.59 | 10661 Users | 873 Reviews

Description Conducive To Books How to Be Alone

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 critics

While 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.

Point Books To How to Be Alone

Original Title:	How to Be Alone: Essays
ISBN:	0312422164 (ISBN13: 9780312422165)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Containing Books How to Be Alone

Ratings: 3.59 From 10661 Users | 873 Reviews

Piece Containing Books How to Be Alone

He is a fairly pompous writer. I will start with that because it's important to know the tone from which you will be inflicted pages and pages of advice on how to be "proper" reader in today's society. This book is a series of essays written by Jonathan Franzen recently as well as revisited essays from his past. He laments the fall of the novelist, the over-importance put to privacy and the lack of care afforded to the the public, and deteriorating postal systems (this essay, I must be honest, I

The answer is books!

So Jonathan Franzen doesn't know I exist and couldn't possibly have written this just to show up as confirmation during a week when I needed exactly this sort of confirmation, right? So it just felt that way.Also it could be the title attracted me because cultivating the sort of isolation required for reading and writing does mean being a little dangerously far from the herd and I am ambivalent about it, just as I have an odd little relationship with goodreads because it's a way of not being

A lot of people bitch about Jonathan Franzen, and probably with good reason. Especially in a nation in which mainstream aesthetic values have become conflated with democracy (facepalm), he's viewed as an out-of-touch elitist, an academic leftist, who-- unlike other academic leftists-- actually winds up on bestseller lists, and thus forces his opinions into the national conversation. In fact, he's one of the few American writers today who actually seems willing to challenge the status quo, and

Update: 13 November 2008 Franzen surprised me by saving the best for last. His second from the last essay, "Meet Me in St. Louis" turned out to be the best by far. It's the most personal and also brings the book back to where it started, his childhood home and mine, St. Louis. The first essay, "My Father's Brain" is about his father's slow drift into Alzheimers and the author's own reluctance to accept where his father's going. It is poignant in its understatedness. In "Meet Me in St. Louis"

(B) 75% | More than SatisfactoryNotes: A scrapbook patchwork of previously published prose, lucid though largely forgettable, and expectedly hit and miss.

There are thirteen essays making up this collection and though the theme is consistent - solitude, isolation, independence - the range is still broad and comprises topics as varied as writing, dementia, the prison system, city development etc. To me they all hold up very well with the exception of Lost in the Mail (about the postal system in Chicago; an excruciatingly dull subject and expose although I understand it's really about the breakdown of public society) and Erika Imports (too short to