It's 'Why Bother' that serves as a centerpiece to the collection and a non-fiction companion to The Corrections.

How to Be Alone runs the gamut from straightforward reportage ('Lost in the Mail,' 'Control Units') to painful family memoir ('My Father's Brain') to highbrow literary manifesto ('Why Bother').

How to Be Alone revisits some of the most memorable essays from those magazines, while stopping to question the post-September 11 publishing frenzy surrounding his own novel in 'a time when it seemed that the voices of self and commerce ought to fall silent.' Before he had the dubious distinction of being 'disinvited' from Oprah's Book Club last October, Franzen was an Angry Young Man with two novels - both commercial flops - under his belt and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. Jonathan Franzen's new collection of essays, How to Be Alone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24), coupled with last year's smash hit The Corrections, signals Franzen's ascendancy to this rare breed of writer who dazzles with imagination, intellect, and reportage. These writers - Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Susan Sontag are a few names that come to mind - are also part of an endangered American species known as the 'independent intellectual,' a species that needn't rely on the esoteric culture of academia or the stultifying world of journalism in order to earn a living. Franzen After the Frenzy The post-WWII American literary landscape is dotted with writers whose fictional output is equaled or surpassed by their essayistic work - writers as well known for big ideas as big novels.

How to be alone franzen