A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author ofFreedomandThe Corrections

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them. For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.

Franzens great loves are literature and birds, andThe End of the End of the Earthis a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm ones prejudices, he writes, literature invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you. Whatever his subject, Franzens essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. Hes frank about birds, too (they kill everything imaginable), but his reporting and reflections on themon seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarcticaare both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.

Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit,The End of the End of the Earthprovides a welcome breath of hope and reason.