Provocadora, ingeniosa y emocionante, esta colección de ensayos es una excelente ocasión para profundizar en el ideario de un escritor sin duda colosal.

Esta variada serie de artículos, publicados en los más prestigiosos medios norteamericanos, reúne dieciséis piezas que muestran la amplitud de miras de Franzen, en algún caso con claros tintes autobiográficos. Desde vibrantes reseñas sobre novelistas clásicas como Edith Wharton y contemporáneos como William T. Vollmann -con una evocación muy especial de su amigo David Foster Wallace-, hasta ácidos análisis de la política de Donald Trump y punzantes crónicas de viajes por los cinco continentes, sobre todo por la cada vez menos gélida Antártida, ejemplo flagrante de la deriva autodestructiva de nuestra especie. Y todo ello con la presencia constante de las aves más bellas, más curiosas y más raras del planeta, que no son sólo un aderezo de color en el paisaje, sino el reflejo de una honda pasión irrenunciable.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections―now with a new epilogue

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like "a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them." For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.

Franzen's great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one's prejudices, he writes, literature "invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you." Whatever his subject, Franzen's essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He's frank about birds, too (they kill "everything imaginable"), but his reporting and reflections on them―on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica―are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.
Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.