A great American writer’s confrontation with a great European critic – a personal and intellectual awakening. Karl Kraus: satirist. Controversialist. Forgotten voice of the early twentieth century. Jonathan Franzen: bestseller. Contrarian. One of the greatest novelists working today. Recalling his student days, the celebrated author of ‘The Corrections’ and ‘Freedom’ recounts his discovery of Kraus and presents his own translations and annotations of the philosopher’s most famous essays. A pioneer of self-publishing, Kraus brilliantly attacked the mass media and the dehumanizing machinery of technology and capitalism. A notoriously difficult writer, Kraus has met his match in Franzen: a popular novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions. In the extensive footnotes Franzen explains why Kraus is relevant today – while also revealing his own intellectual and personal preoccupations. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original, ‘The Kraus Project’ is a feast of thought and literature.
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A great American writer’s confrontation with a great European critic – a personal and intellectual awakening.
From the reviews of The Kraus Project: ‘Franzen is still saying something important. Also Kraus can be a joy … you can understand why Franzen likes him, and he sees a dearth of such elegance today’ Sunday Times ‘The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly sceptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and polemical force, quite different in style from the high burnish of his long, deliberative, multi-layered literary novels … as an exercise in controlled rage and as a celebration of and introduction to Karl Kraus it works just so’ Financial Times
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• This is a book borne of Jonathan Franzen’s love and enthusiasm for this little-known German writer and reveals how he discovered Kraus during his university years. • Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is hotly anticipated. The hardback was greeted with good review coverage and we can expect the same again.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780007517442
Publisert
2014-08-28
Utgiver
Vendor
Fourth Estate Ltd
Vekt
310 gr
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
129 mm
Dybde
25 mm
Aldersnivå
00, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
336

Forfatter

Biographical note

Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and graduated from Swarthmore College. He has lived in Boston, Spain, New York, Colorado Springs and Philadelphia. His other novels are ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’, ‘Strong Motion’, ‘The Corrections’ and ‘Freedom’. He is also the author of two collections of non-fiction, ‘How To Be Alone’ and ‘Farther Away’ and ‘The Discomfort Zone’, a memoir. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in the ‘New Yorker’ and ‘Harper’s’, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by ‘Granta’ and the ‘New Yorker’. He lives in New York City.