{"product_id":"9780007389063_how-to-be-alone","title":"How to be Alone","description":"\u003cp\u003ePassionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of ‘The Corrections’.\u003c\/p\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\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":"Jonathan Franzen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47284819820693,"sku":"9780007389063","price":9.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0484\/3175\/9509\/files\/9780007389063.jpg?v=1776992320","url":"https:\/\/harpercollins.com.au\/products\/9780007389063_how-to-be-alone","provider":"HarperCollins AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}