How to Be Alone: Essays PDF
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HOW TO BE ALONE Jonathan Franzen FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK Farrar, Straus and Giroux 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 Copyright ©2002 by Jonathan Franzen. All rights reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanada Ltd Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2002 Earlier versions of most of these essays first appeared in Details, Graywolf Forum, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. The author is extremely grateful to Colin Harrison and Will Danay and he is indebted for life to Henry Finder. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Franzen, Jonathan. How to be alone : essays /Jonathan Franzen.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-374-17327-3 (hc: alk: paper) I. Title. PS3556.R352 H69 2002 814'.54—dc21 002023642 Designed by Abby Kagan www.fsgbooks.com 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 FOR KATHY CHETKOVICH CONTENTS A Word About This Book My Father’s Brain Imperial Bedroom Why Bother? Lost In The Mail Erika Imports Sifting The Ashes The Reader In Exile First City Scavenging Control Units Books In Bed Meet Me In St. Louis Inauguration Day, January 2001 A WORD ABOUT THIS BOOK My third novel, The Corrections, which I’d worked on for many years, was published a week before the World Trade Center fell. This was a time when it seemed that the voices of self and commerce ought to fall silent—a time when you wanted, in Nick Carraway’s phrase, “the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” Nevertheless, business is business. Within forty-eight hours of the calamity, I was giving interviews again. My interviewers were particularly interested in what they referred to as “the Harper’s essay.” (Nobody used the original title, “Perchance to Dream,” that the magazine’s editors had given it.) Interviews typically
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