The Corrections

Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as ‘The Harper’s Essay’, Franzen’s controversial look at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to Be Alone , alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections . Addressing everything from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of his writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America, reminding us that Franzen is one of the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.

    ‘A passionate and compelling piece of work … Each page is studded with irresistible writing which leaves you breathless for more. Franzen’s strength is his ability to combine a rigorous intellectual approach with an upbeat energy, using language which touches the heart as surely as the head’
    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 thecompany 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 ,