The Discomfort Zone : A Personal History
By Jonathan FranzenJonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. "The Discomfort Zone "is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.
The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.
These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, "The Discomfort Zone "narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
Book details
- Hardcover
- 195 pages
- English
- 0374299196
- 9780374299194
About Jonathan Franzen
More Books By Jonathan Franzen
People who bought this also bought
Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure
Used Book
The Safest Place on Earth : Where People Connect and are Forever Changed
Used Book
Collecting Football Cards for Fun and Profit : How to Buy, Store and Trade Them - And Keep Track of Their Value as Investments
Used Book
The Trellis and the Vine : The Ministry Mind-Shift That Changes Everything
Used Book
Women in the Context of International Development and Co-operation: Review and Perspectives
Used Book
Surrounded by Idiots : The Four Types of Human Behaviour (or, How to Understand Those Who Cannot Be Understood)
New Book
The world atlas of wine; a complete guide to the wines and spirits of the world
Used Book
The Road from Coorain : Recollections of a Harsh and Beautiful Journey into Adulthood.
Used Book