![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Jonathan Franzen |
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Language | English |
Genre | Essays |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | April 24, 2012 |
Publication place | United States |
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]