The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov 13, 2018 - Literary Collections - 240 pages

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - ShannonRose4 - LibraryThing

I was intrigued by the first page;Shared in these essays are the realities we are afraid to voice or even admit silently. The truths gathered here are an intelligent and raw meditation on the various and sundry anxieties that define our collective human guilt.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - ShannonRose4 - LibraryThing

I was intrigued by the first page;Shared in these essays are the realities we are afraid to voice or even admit silently. The truths gathered here are an intelligent and raw meditation on the various and sundry anxieties that define our collective human guilt.

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The End of the End of the Earth: Essays
• Author: Jonathan Franzen
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018
• ISBN: 0374719284, 9780374719289
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Literary Collections / Essays