How To Be Alone Essays

Unabridged
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Narrator: Jonathan Franzen , Brian d'Arcy James
Genres: Biographies
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: September 2002
Length: 9 hours
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  • WMA

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Overview

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Now in How to be Alone, discover the personal narratives and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

The audiobook How to be Alone features Franzen's reading of a moving narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease (which won a National Magazine Award and has been reprinted around the world).

Although his essays range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each essay wrestles with essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America.

Here, in 14 essays, are 14 fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture. These essays show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.

Selected Reviews

How to Be Alone

by David Gardner
  • Book Rating: 2/5

How to be alone

by Dennis Francis
  • Book Rating: 1/5

More...

Read All 2

Reviews (2)

How to Be Alone

Written by David Gardner on February 8th, 2005

  • Book Rating: 2/5

While there were some interesting insights presented, by and large this was a long boring rant. The writing is snobbish, overly intellectual, dull and condesending. The author is a mid-westerner, transplanted to New York City who seems ashamed of his mid-western roots. The chapter on his father's death from Alzheimer's was the most isightful and provided an interesting interlude to an otherwise rather hopless book.

How to be alone

Written by Dennis Francis on December 13th, 2004

  • Book Rating: 1/5

Yawn. Angry diatribes about trivial topics like smoking, television, and typewriters; as well as uplifting subjects like Alzheimer's disease and prison reform. I'll never get those seven hours back!

Selected Reviews

How to Be Alone

by David Gardner
  • Book Rating: 2/5

How to be alone

by Dennis Francis
  • Book Rating: 1/5

More...

Read All 2

Author Details

Author Details

Franzen, Jonathan

"Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981 he studied at the Freie Universit„t in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In addition to winning a Whiting Writer's Award in 1998 and the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, he has been named one of ""Twenty Writers for the 21st Century"" by The New Yorker and one of the ""Best Young American Novelists"" by Granta.

Mr. Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion and is a frequent contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker (where portions of The Corrections have appeared). He lives in New York City."