OUR STORE IS CLOSED ON ANZAC DAY: THURSDAY 25 APRIL

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

The Kraus Project

Jonathan Franzen

$24.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Harper Collins
25 August 2014
A great American writer’s confrontation with a great European critic – a personal and intellectual awakening.

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. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.

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.

By:  
Imprint:   Harper Collins
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   310g
ISBN:   9780007517442
ISBN 10:   0007517440
Pages:   336
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Author Website:   http://www.jonathanfranzen.com

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.

Reviews for The Kraus Project

From the reviews of The Kraus Project: ‘Franzen is still saying something important. Also Kraus can be a joy … you can understand why Franzen likes him, and he sees a dearth of such elegance today’ Sunday Times ‘The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly sceptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and polemical force, quite different in style from the high burnish of his long, deliberative, multi-layered literary novels … as an exercise in controlled rage and as a celebration of and introduction to Karl Kraus it works just so’ Financial Times


See Inside

See Also