The information about Farther Away shown above was first featured I'd heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen's new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. if so, wow... Bryan--Treasurer, Middlemarch Appreciation Society. DFW also appears in the eponymous essay, which is easily the best piece in the book. What too few of the stories about him take the time to explain is that he is usually cranky for all of the right reasons. In How to be Alone, he recorded how, after ODing on Gaddis, he was "eager to read shorter, warmer books by James Purdy, Alice Munro" and – a constant foil to po-mo experimentalism – Paula Fox. Franzen understands the sort of writer he is, and I recommend this collection to writers or readers believing they are writers. (He's blind as a mole without his specs, apparently; probably the result of having subjected his peepers to every page of William Gaddis's The Recognitions and about half of JR.). Article It's just bland and muddled. Then at the party – marked, as a consequence of this error, by the absence of the book it was intended to launch – a gatecrasher plucked Franzen's glasses from his face, ran off into the night and demanded a ransom of several thousand pounds. Some people may find it heartening to see that even someone as talented, intelligent and self-critical as Mr Franzen cannot avoid including the odd clunker in this his second essay collection. If he's to be believed, it helped him grow and made him into a better writer. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Reader Reviews. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run. The essays on their work in Farther Away give a tacit continuity to the two volumes, though this is offset by the decision to put the recent Wallace-Crusoe piece near the beginning. - Publishers Weekly BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Only kidding, obviously, but, reading this essay, I experienced a flicker of kinship with the moron who took Franzen's specs hostage, a passing version of the permanent respect I feel for the philistines who attached hamburgers to little helicopters and sent them up to torment David Blaine while he was working his "hunger artist" hustle in the box over the Thames a few years back. A new novel from the NY Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Looking forward to his next novel, which he's speculated could be his last. Table of contents. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary. Also, while we're at it, has no one considered the long-term – potentially lethal – health consequences for a writer of wearing a bandana? They also display two related side-effects of becoming a great novelist. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was ... ... Full Biography Link to Jonathan Franzen's Website. FARTHER AWAY deals with some very personal issues, but ones that Franzen is able to use to illuminate his thoughts on the (mainly) upper-middle class American human condition of the 21st century.