Jonathan Franzen Les Corrections

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction” and lauded its illumination, “through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew.”

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction” and lauded its illumination, “through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew.”

Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its mid-century idealism and became a more polarized society.

Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Rick Moody, Marisha Pessl… Qui sont ces jeunes auteurs - en terme de date de parution plus que d'âge - qui renouvellent aujourd'hui la littérature américaine ? Pour le savoir, Nelly Kaprièlian, critique littéraire aux Inrockuptibles, s'est rendue à New York, en compagnie du réalisateur Sylvain Bergère. Car c'est ici, dans "la cocotte-minute de la culture américaine", selon les termes de l'écrivain Rick Moody, que les nouvelles générations puisent et vivent leur inspiration. À l'instar de leurs aînés Bret Easton Ellis et Jay McInerney qui, dans les années 80, ont révolutionné le roman par leur style satirique, parlé et obscur, voire dopé aux drogues. Mais comme le souligne Jay McInerney, premier invité de cette jouissive balade littéraire, si New York est toujours aussi fertile en invention, la ville a profondément changé, et ses écrivains avec.