How to be alone

Jonathan Franzen´s The 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 1996 look at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How To Be Alone, along with the personal narratives and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the sucsses of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles whith esential themes of Franzen´s writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loleliness in posmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a movng essay on his father´s struggle with Alzheimer´s disease and rueful account of Franzen´s brief ternure as an Oprah Winfrey author.