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Title details for The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen - Wait list

The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen
Robert Petkoff
Audiobook
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A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigour to the themes – both human and literary – that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative and necessary.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 13, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780008299255
      • File size: 185480 KB
      • Duration: 06:26:24

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Robert Petkoff gives voice to the edgy, eclectic, and energetic ideas of National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen. Petkoff hits the difficult balance between being ironic and earnest that is so characteristic of the author's essays. Petkoff races through the complicated, interesting sentences while at the same making sure that we keep track of their meaning with precise enunciation. Listeners are treated to an intellectual persona that sounds like one would expect of Franzen himself. For fans of his fiction and nonfiction alike, this is a title one can dip in and out of on long walks or slow Sunday afternoons. Petkoff makes sure this is an entertaining, as well as contemplative, experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 16, 2018
      A compulsive need to find order, and a love of birding, represent two of the central threads of this stimulating collection of previously published essays from novelist Franzen (Purity). In the opening essay, “The Essay in Dark Times,” Franzen self-identifies as “what people in the world of birding call a lister,” which makes him “morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.” Throughout the essays that follow, Franzen muses about writing, Edith Wharton, climate change, Antarctica, the photographs of Sarah Stolfa, and birds, always birds. Some of his opinions have already stoked controversy: In “A Rooting Interest,” he comments on Wharton’s privileged position amid New York City’s social elite, and observes she had “one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.” In “Save What You Love,” he takes the Audubon Society to task for naming climate change as the greatest threat to birds, when “no individual bird death can be definitively attributed” to it, while statistics indicate that picture windows and outdoor cats kill three billion birds annually. Whether observing the eerie beauty of Antarctica (“far from having melted,” he reports) or dispensing “Ten Rules for the Novelist,” Franzen makes for an entertaining, sometimes prickly, but always quotable companion.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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