 First edition cover | |
| Author | Jonathan Franzen |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Essays |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | April 24, 2012 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 356 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | 0-374-15357-4 (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 759175040 |
| 814/.54 dc23 | |
| LC Class | PS3556.R352 A6 2012 |
Farther Away is a 2012 collection of essays by the American writer Jonathan Franzen. [1] [2] [3]
Most of the essays previously appeared in The New Yorker , The New York Times , The Guardian , and others.
In The New York Times Book Review, the essayist Phillip Lopate wrote that the pieces "demonstrate [Franzen's] generosity, humanity and love of fiction, as well as his own preference for the morally complex over the sentimental. The struggle to be a good human being, against the pulls of solipsism and narcissism, can be glimpsed in every page of these essays, which if nothing else offer a telling battle report from within the consciousness of one of our major novelists." [4]
In the English newspaper The Guardian , writer and critic Geoff Dyer found advances over Franzen's previous essay collection, How to Be Alone : "Franzen seems more gregarious than he was in How to be Alone...These essays are exemplary instances of reader-friendly criticism in that they can be studied profitably even by people unfamiliar with the works in question. They also display [a] related side-effect of becoming a great novelist. That the great novelist is, by default, a great reader...One way or another, the essays in Farther Away are attempts to enlarge the place where literature, and the responsiveness to it, can be preserved." [5]
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Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
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