BRILLIANT, AWARD-WINNING PERSONAL HISTORY FROM THE AUTHOR OF The Corrections

JAs Jonathan Franzen tells it, he was the kind of boy who was scared of spiders, school, dances, urinals, music teachers, boomerangs, popular girls - and his parents. He had nothing against geeky kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them, a fate that would result in instant Social Death. Approaching puberty the way a rookie conman confronts his first scam, he pretended to be a kid who naturally said 'shit' a lot and didn't enjoy calculations on his new six-function Texas Instruments calculator.

The Discomfort Zone is Franzen's story of growing up squirming in his own, über-sensitive skin, from a 'small and fundamentally ridiculous person' through a strangely happy adolescence, into an adult with strong and inconvenient passions. Whether he's writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian Youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effect of Kafka's fiction on his own protracted quest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between bird-watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always engaged with the society that shaped him, and the world we live in now.

His personal history of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood is warmed by the same blend of comic scrutiny and affection that characterize his fiction; the result is an arresting portrait of a man, his family, his nation and our time.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’, ‘Strong Motion’ and ‘The Corrections’. His fiction and nonfiction appear frequently in the New Yorker and Harper’s, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker. He lives in New York City.