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Jonathan Franzen
presents
The End of the End of the Earth:
Essays
This event includes a book signing
DateNov
13
Tuesday
November 13, 2018 7:00 PM ET (Doors at 6:30) |
LocationFirst Parish Church
1446 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 |
Tickets
$28.00 (book included)
$8.00
|
Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned novelist and essayist JONATHAN FRANZEN—author of The Corrections and Freedom—for a discussion of his latest collection of essays, The End of the End of the Earth.
About The End of the End of the Earth
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.
Praise
"Franzen’s third collection of recently published essays and speeches sparkles with intelligent and insightful forays into a limited range of subjects . . . The last, titular essay about a voyage to Antarctica is worth the cover price. Witty, reflective, opinionated essays from a writer with the ability to “laugh in dark times.” —Kirkus Reviews
"A compulsive need to find order, and a love of birding, represent two of the central threads of this stimulating collection . . . Franzen makes for an entertaining, sometimes prickly, but always quotable companion." —Publishers Weekly
Tickets are available online only at harvard.com and harvardbookstore.eventbrite.com. All tickets for this event include a $5 coupon for use in the bookstore. Pre-sale tickets include a copy of The End of the End of the Earth. Books bundled with pre-sale tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-returnable.
Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes
As you exit the station, cross Mass. Ave. and look for the newsstand called Crimson Corner. Turn right and proceed north along Mass. Ave. going toward the Cambridge Common. You will pass the Harvard Coop, Bank of America, and CVS. The First Parish Church is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Church St. Please enter through the front door of the church.
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