How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Now, in How to Be Alone, we discover the personal narratives and dead-on reportage that earned him a wide readership and a National Magazine Award. Although Franzen's subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with the essential themes of his writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, the dubious claims of technology and psychology, the tragic shape of the individual life.