Jonathan Franzen

"House for Sale," a stage adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's essay, will make its off-Broadway debut Oct. 21 to Nov. 18 at the Duke on 42nd Street. In the piece, Franzen wrote about trying to sell his childhood home after his mother's death for a price she would find appropriate. Daniel Fish, who adapted the piece and will direct the show, said Franzen's essay will be presented on stage verbatim, although not entirely the way the National Book Award-winning novelist wrote it. The cast includes Rob Campbell, Christina Rouner, Lisa Joyce, Merritt Janson and Michael Rudko.

Some fine actors have contracted to appear in "How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)," a multi-generational family comedy premiering Wednesday night on ABC. It should do their careers no lasting harm. It is the sort of neither-here-nor-there sitcom that can make me feel faintly sad for the form, and by extension for the health of the nation, and yet it is no worse than so many others that come and go and sometimes, to my surprise, come and stay. If it can only stop pawing at your leg and licking your face for a moment, it may settle down into something you would allow in the house.

BOOKS Following in the footsteps of 2001's "The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, "Freedom," has ignited several fires of controversy across the literary landscape. The biggest rager started with a disgruntled Twitter burst from author Jennifer Weiner, who coined the term "Franzenfreude," for the pain she gets reading the multiple flattering reviews showered on the writer. In this Aloud discussion with Meghan Daum, an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and author of the memoir "Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House," Franzen's complicated position as the literary scene's champion of realism — and its biggest blank scrim, fairly or not, for projecting all kinds of anxiety regarding the current state of literature — will no doubt be examined, alongside the themes of "Freedom," which includes environmentalism and a family in dissolution.

One of the bookstores hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy was powerHouse Arena, which suffered tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Despite preparing by packing up books and getting them off the floor, the 5,000-square-foot store, located in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., was flooded beyond all expectations. Water swept through the store and out again, shattering its front door, destroying stock and damaging its sales system and other infrastructure. On Nov. 3, powerHouse reopened, and on Saturday it's holding a Sandy Hates Books fundraiser . Beginning at noon, it's a nine-hour-long event with readings, book signings, drinks and books for sale.

Jonathan Franzen has written a novel of our times; so imaginatively and expansively of our times, that it seems ahead of them. The news we get about ourselves is always a little out of date. Anyone able to look very hard at where we are right now edges on prophesy. "The 27th City" is Franzen's first novel.

On a recent Saturday morning in Santa Monica, the writer who currently occupies the fluid center of the American literary universe sits as anonymous as a tourist on the front porch of the Georgian Hotel. Unshaven, a bit bleary-eyed behind his glasses, Jonathan Franzen wants nothing more than a strong cup of coffee, but even the waitress serving breakfast hardly pays him any mind.

NEW YORK—There are author success stories. There's winning the lottery. And then there's Chad Harbach. A long-suffering, often-starving MFA graduate, Harbach spent much of his 20s and 30s working temp jobs so he could write a novel, sometimes with barely $100 in his bank account. He thought no one would ever read his book, titled "The Art of Fielding. " It featured, after all, some pretty ambitious literary writing, a prominent gay character and a baseball motif, all no-nos for anyone with aspirations to the fiction bestseller list.

Some fine actors have contracted to appear in "How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)," a multi-generational family comedy premiering Wednesday night on ABC. It should do their careers no lasting harm. It is the sort of neither-here-nor-there sitcom that can make me feel faintly sad for the form, and by extension for the health of the nation, and yet it is no worse than so many others that come and go and sometimes, to my surprise, come and stay. If it can only stop pawing at your leg and licking your face for a moment, it may settle down into something you would allow in the house.

Several weeks into December last year, my parents suggested I might like a Kindle for Christmas. I was sitting in my room at school, and my eyes darted to the bookshelf on my left. From the silence on the line they could tell I wasn't enthusiastic; I muttered something about not needing another gadget, mostly because I couldn't find a way to shape my reluctance into words. The conversation was tactfully forgotten, and Christmas morning, as my grandmother happily unwrapped a Kindle, I found a Jonathan Franzen novel and a new pair of Ugg boots under the tree.

Jonathan Franzen, the author Oprah Winfrey disinvited to dinner, found a forgiving home at the National Book Awards. He won the fiction prize for his acclaimed best-seller "The Corrections." "It's been a bad couple of months here . . . a terrible time," Franzen said, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, although making some wonder if he meant his own public trials. He had repeatedly insulted Winfrey, who picked his novel for her book club, and got kicked off her show.

"House for Sale," a stage adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's essay, will make its off-Broadway debut Oct. 21 to Nov. 18 at the Duke on 42nd Street. In the piece, Franzen wrote about trying to sell his childhood home after his mother's death for a price she would find appropriate. Daniel Fish, who adapted the piece and will direct the show, said Franzen's essay will be presented on stage verbatim, although not entirely the way the National Book Award-winning novelist wrote it. The cast includes Rob Campbell, Christina Rouner, Lisa Joyce, Merritt Janson and Michael Rudko.

Farther Away Essays Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 322 pp., $26 I didn't much like Jonathan Franzen's essay "Farther Away" when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a piece, it seeks to juxtapose the author's visit to the South Pacific island of Masafuera, renamed in the 1960s "for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman whose tale of solitary living … was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe's novel 'Robinson Crusoe,'" with his thoughts on Defoe and on the novel, and, most important, the effort to process the death of his close friend and sometime literary rival David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008.

NEW YORK—There are author success stories. There's winning the lottery. And then there's Chad Harbach. A long-suffering, often-starving MFA graduate, Harbach spent much of his 20s and 30s working temp jobs so he could write a novel, sometimes with barely $100 in his bank account. He thought no one would ever read his book, titled "The Art of Fielding. " It featured, after all, some pretty ambitious literary writing, a prominent gay character and a baseball motif, all no-nos for anyone with aspirations to the fiction bestseller list.

It may be impossible for an author to achieve more acclaim than Toni Morrison, now 81, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Her work is "characterized by visionary force and poetic import," the Nobel Committee wrote, and we'll get more of it May 8, when her 10th novel is published. "Home" is the story of an angry African American veteran of the Korean War who returns, unhappily, to the Georgia community where he was raised. She's not the only Nobel Prize winner returning to shelves.

Several weeks into December last year, my parents suggested I might like a Kindle for Christmas. I was sitting in my room at school, and my eyes darted to the bookshelf on my left. From the silence on the line they could tell I wasn't enthusiastic; I muttered something about not needing another gadget, mostly because I couldn't find a way to shape my reluctance into words. The conversation was tactfully forgotten, and Christmas morning, as my grandmother happily unwrapped a Kindle, I found a Jonathan Franzen novel and a new pair of Ugg boots under the tree.

Jennifer Egan's " A Visit From the Goon Squad " was awarded the fiction prize from the National Book Critics Circle on Thursday evening, besting Jonathan Franzen's widely publicized novel " Freedom " and works by David Grossman, Hans Keilson and Paul Murray. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Egan's novel is an innovatively structured work about characters involved in the music industry. The title is taken from an Elvis Costello song that is also about time and how decisions echo across generations.

One of the bookstores hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy was powerHouse Arena, which suffered tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Despite preparing by packing up books and getting them off the floor, the 5,000-square-foot store, located in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., was flooded beyond all expectations. Water swept through the store and out again, shattering its front door, destroying stock and damaging its sales system and other infrastructure. On Nov. 3, powerHouse reopened, and on Saturday it's holding a Sandy Hates Books fundraiser . Beginning at noon, it's a nine-hour-long event with readings, book signings, drinks and books for sale.

Why is everybody so upset with Jonathan Franzen? All he did was to utter publicly what countless other writers have long thought: that the Oprah-ization of American literature may have its problems after all.

The 20 finalists for the 2010 National Book Awards were announced Wednesday in Savannah, Ga., marking one significant achievement and the surprising exclusion of Jonathan Franzen's mammoth novel "Freedom" from the fiction finalists amid familiar echoes of dissatisfaction. Two Los Angeles Times staffers received nods for their nonfiction books, developed from their work for The Times: Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" and Megan K. Stack's "Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War. " The National Book Foundation, which runs the awards, said that work from two reporters at a single news organization has not been recognized in the last decade.

BOOKS Following in the footsteps of 2001's "The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, "Freedom," has ignited several fires of controversy across the literary landscape. The biggest rager started with a disgruntled Twitter burst from author Jennifer Weiner, who coined the term "Franzenfreude," for the pain she gets reading the multiple flattering reviews showered on the writer. In this Aloud discussion with Meghan Daum, an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and author of the memoir "Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House," Franzen's complicated position as the literary scene's champion of realism — and its biggest blank scrim, fairly or not, for projecting all kinds of anxiety regarding the current state of literature — will no doubt be examined, alongside the themes of "Freedom," which includes environmentalism and a family in dissolution.