‘How to be Alone’, is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as `The Harper`s Essay`, Franzen`s controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. From the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, from his father`s struggle with Alzheimer`s disease to a rueful account of Franzen`s brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author, each piece wrestles with Franzen`s familiar themes: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern imperial America.

These collected essays record what Franzen calls `a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer.` They voice a wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.