The Corrections

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by Jonathan Franzen


  Time Out

  ‘Oprah was right. Franzen is conflicted. That’s what makes him a trustworthy, sceptical essayist’

  FT

  ISBN: 978-0-00-715358-9

  JONATHAN FRANZEN

  The Discomfort Zone

  ‘Full of self-deprecating comedy, vivid social insight and rigorous intelligence … Luminous, essential reading’

  Observer

  As Jonathan Franzen tells it, he was the kind of boy who was scared of spiders, school, dances, urinals, music teachers, boomerangs, popular girls – and his parents. He had nothing against geeky kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them, a fate that would result in instant Social Death.

  The Discomfort Zone is Franzen’s story of growing up in his own, über-sensitive skin, from a ‘small and fundamentally ridiculous person’ through a strangely happy adolescence, into an adult with strong and inconvenient passions. It is also one of the finest writers of our age on top form – arrestingly personal and strikingly funny.

  ‘A deeply lyrical and thought-provoking book, easily an equal to the wonderful How to Be Alone, in which Franzen first demonstrated his mastery of the personal essay’

  The Times

  ‘A great pleasure, containing some perceptive and beautiful writing about family and childhood’

  Guardian

  ‘Deeply loveable: clever, honest, brilliantly well written and funny … Delicious: with every sentence his prose reminds you why The Corrections so dazzled’

  Scotsman

  ISBN: 978-0-00-723425-7

  Praise

  From the reviews of The Corrections:

  ‘Intelligent, compellingly readable, funny and above all generous spirited, it is a rare thing, a modern novel with both head and heart’

  TERENCE BLACKER, Daily Mail

  ‘A genuine masterpiece, the first great American novel of the twenty-first century. Sentence by whiplash sentence this novel offers extraordinary pleasures of language, of structure, of plot, of perception, of history, and, most dazzlingly, of character… A wisecracking, eloquent, heartbreaking beauty’

  WILL BLYTH, Elle

  ‘For anyone who has ever found themselves guiltily yearning for an Anne Tyler while in the middle of an Updike or Wolfe. The Lamberts are utterly believable, and once they have all told their stories you can’t help but sympathise with them. Be prepared to be moved’

  LAURENCE PHELAN, Independent on Sunday

  ‘In its complexity, its scrutinising and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann’s Buddenbrooks and DeLillo’s White Noise. It is a major accomplishment’

  MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  ‘The Corrections is the whole package… You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place’

  JOHN LEONARD, New York Review of Books

  ‘A major novel that reflects the achievements of Updike and DeLillo while being an entirely original voice. A big, beautiful novel’

  GEORGE WALDEN, Evening Standard

  ‘A remarkably energetic novel, by turns funny, caustic, upsetting and dramatic’

  CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday

  ‘As good as anything I’ve ever read’

  RACHEL CUSK, Daily Telegraph

  ‘A big-hearted, panoramic American epic, intelligent and wise but also wildly, stonkingly funny’

  LIZ JENSEN, Independent

  ‘Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth and that’s why there is so much excitement about it’

  DAVID SEXTON, Evening Standard

  ‘Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture’

  DON DELILLO

  ‘What this man writes is true, and what is true indicts us. The Corrections transcends its many wonderful moments to become that rarest of things, a contemporary novel that will endure’

  SVEN BIRKERTS, Esquire

  ‘Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures that great fiction affords’

  DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  About the Author

  JONATHAN FRANZEN is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. His fiction and nonfiction appears frequently in the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, and he has been named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker. He lives in New York City.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Jonathan Franzen

  The Twenty-Seventh City

  Strong Motion

  How to Be Alone

  The Discomfort Zone

  Copyright

  Harper Perennial An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London w6 8jb

  www.harperperennial.co.uk

  1

  First published in paperback by Fourth Estate 2002 First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2001

  Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

  EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007317998

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