Jonathan Franzen

With a microphone in hand, BBC Correspondent Andrew North has covered war and crises around the world. But lately he’s added another tool to his reporting kit: A sketchbook. On his latest reporting trip to cover the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, be put down his microphone and picked up a paintbrush.

This is a cautionary tale of class, money, and society. Lily is a smart single woman, a beauty in demand on the party circuit. But Lily is nearing thirty, and struggling to manage money, friendships, and romance. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton examined the dangerous compromises facing a woman who wants to set […]

Ever since Jonathan Franzen wowed the literary world with his 2001 novel The Corrections, he’s been hailed as the next great American writer. His latest book Freedom, out in paperback later this month, was another roundly praised bestseller.

Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age. Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We’ll drive around the tony Long […]

Our extended cut of Kurt’s conversation with Jonathan Franzen, in which the novelist talks about the influence of Tolstoy on his writing, and laments being recognized during a trip to the supermarket for sugar-free Jell-O.