Adult

Henry Lang is a smart but unassuming young man with a degree from Harvard and limited social skills. After his parents are killed in a freak sailing accident, leaving him a substantial inheritance, he moves to Brooklyn to see if he can make it in publishing, perhaps fall in love, and attend the sorts of parties and events that he imagines 20-somethings in Brooklyn most likely frequent.

Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Facing a bone marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle.

Susan Lindley is a woman adrift after her husband’s death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle’s Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to “the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.” Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans --- including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women --- joins her in residence.

Hal, a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her young employer, T., and haunted by the accident that paralyzed his daughter, Casey. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find T.

One day, Pops's inventions falter and this lovably eccentric family loses every penny. They wake up to find that they and the entire contents of their penthouse have been transported to Central Park. Aided by their two loyal housekeepers and fed by the maitre d' from their favorite restaurant, the family makes Central Park into a surprisingly comfortable home. But soon the strains of life --- and weather --- tear apart the parents' relationship. As Christmas approaches, the children must find a way to reunite them.

On a small snow-covered island lives 12-year-old Minou, her philosopher Papa, Boxman the magician, and a clever dog called No-Name. A year earlier, Minou's mother left the house wearing her best shoes and carrying a large black umbrella. She never returned. One morning, Minou finds a dead boy washed up on the beach. Her father decides to lay him in the room that once belonged to her mother. Can her mother’s disappearance be explained by the boy?

One manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Amina leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. For Amina, the decision echoes the arranged marriages of her home country, while George finds Amina “straightforward” and likes that she “doesn’t play games.” Yet each is hiding something from the other.

In FARTHER AWAY, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. These pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing.