A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus
was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers
in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s
manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of
technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a
fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz
Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely
prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work..
In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus
but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul
Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous
and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice
unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments.
While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own
literary heroes, Franzen’s annotations soar over today’s cultural landscape and then dive
down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in
love with Kraus. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a
feast of thought, passion, and literature.
About The Author:
Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and
graduated from Swarthmore College.
He has lived in Boston, Spain, New York,
Colorado Springs and Philadelphia. His
other novels are ‘The Twenty-Seventh
City’, ‘Strong Motion’, ‘The Corrections’
and ‘Freedom’. He is also the author of
two collections of non-fiction, ‘How To
Be Alone’ and ‘Farther Away’ and ‘The
Discomfort Zone’, a memoir. His fiction
and non-fiction appear frequently in
the ‘New Yorker’ and ‘Harper’s’, and he
was named one of the best American
novelists under forty by ‘Granta’ and
the ‘New Yorker’. He lives in New York
City.
