Jonathan E. Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is a novelist and essayist whose 2001 novel, The Corrections, won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel Freedom (2010) received similar praise and won the John Gardner Award, the Heartland Prize, and a Salon Book Award, among others. His novels combine brilliant storytelling with shrewd exploration of character, and subtle tracing of the intimate connections among the life of the mind, the 'vortex' of happy and unhappy family relations, and, as one critic put it, "the swarming consciousness of a whole culture, our culture." Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. In 2013, he published The Kraus Project, consisting of translations of three major essays by the late Austrian essayist and journalist Karl Kraus (1874-1936).