Franzen, Jonathan

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless -- unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

Neighbors wonder what is going on when Patty and Walter Berglund, once an ideal couple and perfect parents, begin to unravel, with their son moving in with the Republicans next door, Walter, an environmental lawyer, taking a job in the coal industry, and Patty becoming unhinged.

"A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a dark-hued comedy of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has created yet another cast of vividly original characters, Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Jonathan Franzen is a major author of our time, and Purity is his edgiest and most searching book yet"--.

After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun, but the members of her dysfunctional family make it difficult.

The author describes his youth in the Midwest and his adulthood in New York, as well as many of the formative experiences of his life.

In this satirical look at the American family, a Midwestern mother named Enid, whose husband is losing his mind to Parkinson's disease and whose grown, self-destructive children are facing their own problems, attempts to arrange a happy family Christmas.

The author of the award-winning "The Corrections" offers this collection of writings. He remarks on such topics as the American novel, the sex advice industry, his father's Alzheimer's disease, supermax prisons, and his interactions with Oprah Winfrey.

Presents a collection of essays and speeches that consider the human and literary themes that have shaped the author's life, exploring such topics as the suicide of David Foster Wallace, and the ways in which technology has changed how people express love.

After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun, but the members of her dysfunctional family make it difficult.

Neighbors wonder what is going on when Patty and Walter Berglund, once an ideal couple and perfect parents, begin to unravel, with their son moving in with the Republicans next door, Walter, an environmental lawyer, taking a job in the coal industry, and Patty becoming unhinged.