{"product_id":"how-to-be-alone-1","title":"Jonathan Franzen: How to be Alone [2003] paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003ePassionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of 'The Corrections'.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e          \u003cp\u003eJonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst 'The Corrections' was the best-loved and most written-about novel the previous decade. 'How to be Alone', is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen's controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. From the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, from his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease to a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author, each piece wrestles with Franzen's familiar themes: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern imperial America.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e          \u003cp\u003eThese collected essays record what Franzen calls 'a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance - even a celebration - of being a reader and a writer.' They voice a 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 the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Franzen, Jonathan","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":47665285169491,"sku":"9780007153589","price":14.27,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false},{"title":"Very Good","offer_id":47365061378387,"sku":"XV80007153589","price":6.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false},{"title":"Good","offer_id":50020036575571,"sku":"XG80007153589","price":6.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0616\/4001\/6057\/files\/franzen-jonathan-jonathan-franzen-how-to-be-alone-2003-paperback-58500984144211.jpg?v=1735495713","url":"https:\/\/theirishbookshop.live\/products\/how-to-be-alone-1","provider":"Chapters Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}