Jonathan Franzen
Author
Series
Key to all mythologies volume 1
Description
"It's December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 34
Appears on list
Description
The novel follows the delamination of the Lambert family Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson's-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 36
Formats
Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family. Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul-the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's...
4) Purity
Author
Formats
Description
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes - both human and literary - that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.9 - AR Pts: 11
Formats
Description
The author describes growing up in a family of all boys in Webster Groves, Missouri, reflecting on such topics as the dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, his role as the school prankster, his marriage, and the life lessons he has learned from birds.
Author
Formats
Description
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance, he falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Description
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism,...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2010
Description
The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.
Author
Pub. Date
2007
Description
"First performed under heavy censorship in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid public outrage and charges of obscenity. The play's content was radical indeed: teenage sex, suicide, abortion, masturbation, sadomasochism. But even more radical was the unsentimental and brutally authentic comedy with which Wedekind treated it. The story traces the dawning sexual awareness of four teenagers,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015], c1970.
Description
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless steel sink is new, their Mercedes is parked at the curb. But when Sophie is bitten by a possibly rabies-infected stray cat, a series of disasters begin to plague the Brentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines in a marriage--and a society--wrenching itself apart.--From publisher description.