The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen

Overview

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections—now with a new epilogue

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.

Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.

Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250234896
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	533,535
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the Earth (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1959

Place of Birth:

Western Springs, Illinois

Education:

B.A., Swarthmore College, 1981; studied as a Fulbright scholar at Freie Universität in Berlin

Website:

http://www.jonathanfranzen.com

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE ESSAY IN DARK TIMES 1

MANHATTAN 1981 23

WHY BIRDS MATTER 33

SAVE WHAT YOU LOVE 41

CAPITALISM IN HYPERDRIVE 67

MAY YOUR LIFE BE RUINED 75

A FRIENDSHIP 97

A ROOTING INTEREST 109

TEN RULES FOR THE NOVELIST 123

MISSING 127

THE REGULARS 147

INVISIBLE LOSSES 155

9/13/01 175

POSTCARDS FROM EAST AFRICA 181

THE END OF THE END OF THE EARTH 193

XING PED 227

Editorial Reviews

"The work of a writer at the top of his game." —Sarah Crown, The Guardian

"Franzen, unlike many, listens. It’s what makes him one of the best living writers of fictional dialogue, and it’s what makes his arguments productively provocative." —Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post

From the Publisher