| Farther Away | |
| Author: | Jonathan Franzen |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Essays |
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Release Date: | April 24, 2012 |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages: | 356 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| Isbn: | 0-374-15357-4 |
| Isbn Note: | (first edition, hardback) |
| Dewey: | 814/.54 dc23 |
| Congress: | PS3556.R352 A6 2012 |
| Oclc: | 759175040 |
Farther Away is a 2012 collection of essays by the American writer Jonathan Franzen.[1] [2] [3]
Most of the essays previously appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.
Culture Critic assessed critical response as an aggregated score of 80%,[4] while The BookScore assessed it at an aggregated critic score of 7.3/10 based on an accumulation of British and American press reviews.[5] [6] On July/Aug 2012 issue of Bookmarks Magazine, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "Franzen's crisp, incisive prose, frankness, and engaging sense of humor make Farther Away standard Franzen fare".[7] [8]
In The New York Times Book Review, the essayist Phillip Lopate wrote that the pieces "demonstrate [Franzen's] generosity, humanity and love of fiction, as well as his own preference for the morally complex over the sentimental. The struggle to be a good human being, against the pulls of solipsism and narcissism, can be glimpsed in every page of these essays, which if nothing else offer a telling battle report from within the consciousness of one of our major novelists."[9]
In the English newspaper The Guardian, writer and critic Geoff Dyer found advances over Franzen's previous essay collection, How to Be Alone: "Franzen seems more gregarious than he was in How to be Alone...These essays are exemplary instances of reader-friendly criticism in that they can be studied profitably even by people unfamiliar with the works in question. They also display [a] related side-effect of becoming a great novelist. That the great novelist is, by default, a great reader...One way or another, the essays in Farther Away are attempts to enlarge the place where literature, and the responsiveness to it, can be preserved."[10]