Listen free for 30 days
-
The Discomfort Zone
- A Personal History
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
The Discomfort Zone
Buy Now for $27.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s; the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity; the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school; his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death; and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned from watching birds.
These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
What the critics say
"Wonderful." (Publishers Weekly)
"[A] gratifyingly unpredictable and finely crafted collection." (Booklist)