Jonathan Franzen

A one-of-a-kind celebration of America's greatest comic strip--and the life lessons it can teach us--from a stellar array of writers and artists Peanuts, Charles Schulz's beloved comic strip, has given the world a cast of characters for the ages--Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy among them. Here, in an unprecedented collection of thirty-two essays, artists and writers ranging from Ann Patchett to Chris Ware consider the deeper truths of Peanuts, its influence on their lives and on the culture more broadly, and the lessons it can teach us about disappointment, melancholy, and those fleeting moments of warm-puppy happiness. The contributors reflect on the experience of discovering Peanuts as a child, their identification with its characters and predicaments, and, for the artists in the book, the momentous effects of their encounters with the strip on their later careers. Taken together, the essays and comics of The Peanuts Papers enrich our understanding of the Peanuts gang and its world, with contributions not only about Charlie Brown and Snoopy but also Linus, Sally, Pigpen, and Peppermint Patty. The Peanuts Papers is an enchanting, poignant gathering of responses to the greatest American comic strip, enabling us to see it anew in fresh and revealing ways.

Portret van een dysfunctioneel Amerikaans gezin van de jaren tachtig van de 20e eeuw tot heden.

This collection of Franzen's non-fiction confirms his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a master noticer, social critic, and self-investigator. In 'Farther Away', he returns to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him.

The author describes growing up in a family of all boys in Webster Groves, Missouri, reflecting on such topics as the dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, his role as the school prankster, his marriage, and the life lessons he has learned from birds.

"Der FDP fehlen nicht kluge Konzepte in den verschiedenen Politikfeldern. Daran herrscht kein Mangel. Wir glauben aber nicht daran, dass eine Partei nur wegen sinnvoller Maßnahmevorschläge gewählt wird. Sie erhält vielmehr Zustimmung, wenn sie mit einer positiven politischen Erzählung verbunden wird, die das Lebensgefühl der Menschen trifft und ihnen Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zukunft macht. Eine solche Tonalität wollen wir für unsere Partei, um den politisch-konzeptionellen Führungsanspruch der FDP mit Empathie zu untermauern! Das ist kein Beleg für gegenwärtige Schwäche, sondern Ausdruck des festen Willens, sich neuen gesellschaftlichen Realitäten stellen und immer mehr Menschen für sich begeistern zu wollen." Mit diesem Band ergreifen jüngere liberale Politiker erstmals gemeinsam das Wort, um das Wertefundament des politischen Liberalismus und damit verbunden ihre Ideen von liberaler Politik im 21. Jahrhundert vorzustellen: von der Wirtschafts- über die Bildungs-, Sozial- und Umweltpolitik bis hin zu den internationalen Beziehungen. Unterstützt werden sie von Autoren aus Wirtschaft, Kultur und Wissenschaft.

The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

Paluten ist ein echter Abenteurer und kann schon gar nicht mehr zählen, wie oft er Freedom nun schon gerettet hat. Professor Entes Klonmaschine hat sich dabei in der Vergangenheit als besonders hilfreich erwiesen. Doch ausgerechnet die geht jetzt kaputt. Für die Reparatur benötigt er ein besonders seltenes Metall, welches es nur auf dem Gipfel des höchsten und gefährlichsten Berg Freedoms gibt: Mount Schmeverest. Paluten und Edgar machen sich natürlich sofort auf den Weg, um das seltene Metall zu besorgen, stoßen dabei allerdings auf unerwartete Gefahren und unvorhergesehene Hindernisse. Schaffen sie es, diesen Widrigkeiten zu trotzen und das Metall zu bekommen?

Another second novel. As always Franzen’s scope is immense, and his talent is clear on every page. If Palanuick is the very best writer, sentence to sentence, then Franzen is clearly the best living novelist. This story involves one Louis Holland, and a Harvard seismologist named Dr. Reneé Seitchek, and it revolves around abortion activists, big corporations, and strange sudden earthquakes appearing near Boston, which every Harvard seismologist knows is very strange indeed. It writes about the evil of corporations, but in a stronger, more mature way than Palanuick. Franzen is a historian, and he tells us exactly why the world is bad, how it came to be that way. He goes all the way back to the colonization of America, but not in a preachy or boring way. He personifies a raccoon for five pages, which is strangely one of the most poignant parts of the whole book. The two main characters are what make the book. The medium-attractive Renee’ Seitchek and the lonely, lost Louis Holland, who fall for each other but seemingly never at the same time, and have painful rubbing sex as the earth shakes underneath them. Franzen is a master and a genius; he builds and constructs. He creates suspense, and makes us wait for whatever’s going to happen. He makes us work for it. As with the #1 author on this list, you can imagine him standing behind a door somewhere laughing at all of his readers. He’s smarter than us, and God can the man write. This novel succeeds where The Twenty-seventh City fell a little short, and The Corrections overthrew.

"The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like 'a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.' For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen's great loves are literature and birds, and [this book] is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one's prejudices, he writes, literature 'invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.' Whatever his subject, Franzen's essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He's frank about birds, too (they kill 'everything imaginable'), but his reporting and reflections on them--on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica--are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason."--Dust jacket.

"A huge-canvased novel about identity, the internet, sexual politics, and love from the author of Freedom and The Corrections"-- Young 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. 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.--Dust jacket.