Bøger af Jonathan Franzen

Russ er en frustreret præst, hvis svagheder og frustrationer nok er menneskelige, men ikke mindre i vejen for både ægteskab og familieliv af den grund. Hans hustru Marion er et kompliceret geni, plaget af en historie med psykisk sygdom. Mellem ægteparret befinder deres fire børn sig, som hver især må finde deres vej i familien og i verden.Korsveje af den amerikanske forfatter Jonathan Franzen er en roman, der graver dybt i karakterernes psykologi og interne relationer, og som samtidig skildrer USA fra Vietnam-krigen og frem, en nation i oprør og midt i store forandringer. Det er en roman om familieliv og søskenderivalisering, hvor hver enkelt må kæmpe for at finde mening i livet, men også en stort anlagt roman om USA's åndelige og samfundsmæssige krise i 1970'erne. 

I PURITY, fortæller den prisvindende amerikanske forfatter Jonathan Franzen historien om den unge kvinde, Purity Tyler, der leder efter sin far, som hun aldrig har mødt. Rejsen bringer hende i kontakt med en karismatisk hacker og whistleblower, og samtidig skal det vise sig, at hendes eget familiemysterie sender tråde fra nutidens USA til Sydamerika og Østtyskland før Berlinmurens fald. Franzen behandler store temaer som seksualpolitik, kærlighed og forældreroller. Som i KORREKTIONER og FRIHED skaber han troværdige karakterer, hvis liv vi som læsere bliver fuldkommen opslugt af, men stilistisk set udgør denne roman dog et nybrud for Franzen. Den overbevisende nutidsrealisme bliver som altid fuldt udfoldet, men samtidig bliver den her suppleret med en fabulerende og drømmeagtig kvalitet med næsten mytologiske undertoner. PURITY er en episk slægtsroman om familie-, stats- og forretningshemmeligheder, der forbinder og påvirker mennesker på uforudsete måder. Bogen udkommer på engelsk i september 2015 – samme måned som den udkommer på dansk.

De seneste 25 år har den amerikanske forfatter Jonathan Franzen ved siden af sit succesrige skønlitterære forfatterskab levet et andet liv som risikovillig essayist. I sin nye essaysamling giver han blandt andet et bud på, hvordan vi tackler en uundgåelig klimakrise. For krisen er uafvendelig, ifølge Franzen. Men i stedet for at stirre os blinde og magtesløse på klimaapokalypsens komme skal vi koncentrere os om de mange mindre ting, som det faktisk er muligt at gøre noget ved. Uanset emne er Jonathan Franzen altid kritisk over for forudindtagede holdninger, og hans essays er lige så gennemsyrede af ironi, som de er ærlige om egne ufuldkommenheder. Franzen er også ærlig om sin store passion: fugle (de dræber ”alt muligt”), men hans beskrivelser af dem – havfugle i New Zealand, sangere i Østafrika, pingviner i Antarktis – er både en rørende hyldest til deres skønhed og livskraft og en opfordring til os alle om at redde det, vi holder af. Forfatteren til bøger som Korrektioner, Frihed og Purity er her tilbage med en ny tankevækkende og dybt vedkommende essaysamling. Behersket, med vid og bid og omhyggelige argumenter, sørger Ved enden af verdens ende for et velkomment pust af håb og fornuft.

Brudzone er en roman om kærlighed og jordskælv. Men det er først og fremmest en roman om familien, som udspringet for de største seismologiske rystelser. Franzen dissekerer i sin store fortælling det moderne familieliv, der på godt og ondt udgør de fleste menneskers største brudzone.Brudzone er Jonathan Franzens anden bog, udgivet i USA i 1993.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Franzens personlige beretning om en opvækst i Midtvesten og et voksenliv i New York er præget af samme dybdeborende humor og empati, som man finder i hans romaner, og resultatet er en beretning om den unge Franzens genvordigheder.

Forfatteren bag sidste års store roman Korrektioner, Jonathan Franzen, giver her ni bud på kunsten at være alene i lige så mange fremragende essays. Emnerne spænder vidt, men centrale temaer fra Korrektioner genkendes her: bl.a. det personlige livs erodering og det stigende problem med at fastholde retten til at være alene i en støjende og distraherende massekultur, der kategoriserer singler som tabere.

Patty og Walter Berglund var St. Pauls pionerer, de var først med alt det nye – økologi, social sensitivitet og inddragende børneopdragelse. Patty var den ideelle nabo, typen der kunne fortælle dig, hvor du kunne aflevere din batterier til genbrug, eller hvordan du fik de lokale myndigheder til at engagere sig i kvarteret. Hun var den misundelsesværdigt perfekte mor og Walters drømmehustru. Sammen med Walter – økojurist, pendlercyklist, 100 procent familiemand – gjorde hun sit til at gøre verden til et bedre sted.Men nu, i det nye årtusinde, har familien Berglund udviklet sig til et mysterium. Hvorfor er deres teenagesøn flyttet over til den aggressivt republikanske nabofamilie? Hvorfor arbejder Walter pludseligt for kulindustrien? Hvad laver rockmusikeren Richard Katz – Walters bedste ven og største rival fra collegeårene – stadig i billedet? Men først og fremmest: Hvad er der sket med Patty? Hvorfor har kvarterets tidligere lysende stjerne forvandlet sig til en utilregnelig furie?Mens Jonathan Franzens roman ”Korrektioner” var et ætsende familieportræt og en stor fortælling om kærlighed, handler Franzens nye roman om frihedens fristelser og byrder: ungdommens frydefulde lyst; de midaldrendes skrøbelige kompromisser; livet i forstæderne og USA's stormagtsgenvordigheder i Irak. Som også i ”Korrektioner” fanger Franzen i ”Frihed” suverænt sine personers kamp for at finde rundt i en forvirrende verden. ”Frihed” er en fuldendt roman om den måde vi lever vores liv lige nu og her.  

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