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/lit/ - Literature

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File: 26 KB, 380x471, Franzen, Jonathan.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
1230467 No.1230467 [Reply] [Original]

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Jonathan-Franzens-Favorite-Fiction-Books

>Johnathan Franzen Picks Favorite Post 1940 Books

Oh cool. He's using his celebrity to bring more modern, less known work to light. That's kind of a cool thing to do, as long as I don't spend much time thinking about whether he had to stick to certain publishing companies. Maybe I have this gu--

>Joseph Heller's 'Something Happened'

What the fuck Franzen?

To be fair I haven't read most of these, and there WERE a few on my list to-do in 2011 getting pimped ('A Personal Matter,' 'The Man Who Loved Children'). Just letting you guys know.

>> No.1230492
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1230492

You can't stop him.

>> No.1230501

Uh, it looks like he was just listing his favorite books. Some are by well known authors, others are not

>> No.1231238

every time someone takes an impressively misleading author photo glamour shot of jonathan franzen an angel gets its wings

i don't get your beef either op, scheez

>> No.1231289

I must say, that's a disappointingly anodyne list. But I highly doubt that Franzen is "sticking to certain publishing companies" and I agree he's deliberately choosing stuff that's less well known.

However I feel absolutely certain that he's choosing these titles with Oprah uppermost in his mind. Three works each by Alice Munro and Jane Smiley is not just thinking, people who like Oprah will like this, it's also being done in order to balance the fact that there are (technically) more men than women on this list. In other words, this is the sort of stuff that people who liked "Freedom" might also like, but he also goes out of his way to include One Asian Woman, One Asian Man, Two Black Women, One Black Man, some satirical stuff (Heller, Saunders) some more sincere stuff, but it mostly looks that smug Swarthmore-College PC mindset that is the one thing about Franzen that I find pretty wearying.

But it also indicates that he's not exactly going to foist off Jane Bowles or Pynchon or anything even remotely outré upon Oprah's unsuspecting Book Club.

Also, picking Lorrie Moore's least interesting book is just weird, unless (as I'm hoping) he likes Lorrie Moore so much that he's putting forward something that got indifferent reviews and trying to ask people to give it a second chance.