How to Be Alone » (Revised)

Best known for his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen is equally adept at turning out elegant essays, social commentary, and cultural criticism.

Here, in fourteen essays, are fourteen fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture.

The New York Times Book Review

[Franzen] starts from the hypothesis, basic to any good novelist's inquiry, that even the simplest, most trivial activities are riven with complexities, and then proceeds, with exemplary ethical seriousness, grouchy stubbornness and silken wit, to break those complexities down into their moral, psychological and historical components.