Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

Franzen, Jonathan

Paperback

Literary FiguresLetters & Essays

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 1250234891
ISBN13: 9781250234896
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: Mar 31 2020
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

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.

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