юмористическая фантастика

литературоведение

Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of ‘The Corrections’.Jonathan Franzen&apos;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 &apos;The Harper&apos;s Essay&apos;, Franzen&apos;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&apos;s struggle with Alzheimer&apos;s disease to a rueful account of Franzen&apos;s brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author, each piece wrestles with Franzen&apos;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 &apos;a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer.&apos; 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.