franzen

Franzen's main extravagance is watching birds, a hobby he took up after The Corrections.

" It's saying, " I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I'm not going to read this one.

To borrow a term from the visual arts, Franzen's writing has an enviable depth of field: it keeps a great deal in focus simultaneously.

As he did with his laptop, Franzen has stripped his world of virtually all distractions.

Birds are supposed to be free, or that's what the song says, but when Franzen looks at them, that's not what he sees.

Franzen is a member of another perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist.

For Franzen's characters, too much freedom is an empty, dangerously entropic thing.

Wallace and Franzen weren't just friends; they were part of each other's writing lives.

"To use, in Dave's honor, a tennis metaphor, I felt like I had a good hitting partner, " Franzen says.

"I was just settling down to work again, " Franzen says, "when Dave killed himself. "

"If those books get them into reading, that has great repercussions for making them smarter, " Dr. McGill-Franzen said.

is a forthcoming novel by National Book Award-winning American author Jonathan Franzen.

Franzen is the ultimate literary Halloween costume for the lazy man (or woman).

Franzen is a midwesterner, born outside Chicago and raised in a suburb of St. Louis.

Jonathan Franzen was sitting next to me. We talked.

All this is a particular shame because the allegations of elitism leveled at Franzen are not only untrue, they're the opposite of true.

Franzen didn't indulge; in fact he'd quit smoking a decade earlier.

The way Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't.

A writer has to be both boxer and trainer at the same time, and Franzen's trainer is a hard-ass.

In spite of all these precautions, Franzen got stuck.

If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up, chill out and have a sea urchin.