Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen's controversial look in 1996 at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in 'How To Be Alone', alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of 'The Corrections'. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls 'a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer'. At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.

Praise for 'The Corrections'

"Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth."
DAVID SEXTON, 'Evening Standard'

"No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch. Jonathan Franzen joins Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Richard Ford among those North Americans whose work keeps reminding us that the Booker Prize is only the Commonwealth Games of fiction."
JEREMY TREGLOWEN, 'Financial Times'

"'The Corrections' is the whole package…You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded why you read serious fiction in the first place."
JOHN LEONARD, 'New York Review of Books'

"A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question, what life is for – and that is as much as anyone could ask."
BLAKE MORRISON, 'Guardian'

"In its complexity, its scrutinising and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, 'The Corrections' stands in the company of Mann's 'Buddenbrooks' and DeLillo's 'White Noise'. It is a major accomplishment."
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM