The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections

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.

Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/13/2018
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.70w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780374147938

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/15/2018 pg. 56
Publishers Weekly 07/16/2018
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2018 pg. 31
Library Journal 09/15/2018 pg. 59
Booklist 10/01/2018 pg. 8
Shelf Awareness 01/04/2019

About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the Earth (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.