An Evening with Jonathan Franzen at the Mondavi Center

I read Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” while riding busses to and from work in San Francisco last winter. I started and ended my days with it for an entire month, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

But it also drove me a bit crazy, mostly because the characters were so deeply flawed, which in turn also made them compelling. Regardless, it kept me thinking about the complexity of human relationships from cover to cover, to the point that I didn't want my bus rides to end. 

I was excited to see that he’ll be speaking at the Mondavi Center on October 8 at 8 pm. He’ll be opening the Center’s distinguished speaker series.

A post performance Q&A will be moderated by Eric Rauchway, Professor, Department of History, UC Davis. Buy tickets here. 

More information about Franzen is below. And here’s a bit about his famous Oprah controversy from the New York Times.

National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Franzen exploded onto the literary scene in 2001 with The Corrections, an enormous international bestseller with translations in 35 languages, and American hardcover sales of nearly one million copies. His most recent novel, Freedom, was chosen as one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010 and was also a finalist in the fiction category for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.

In his Mondavi Center appearance, Franzen will investigate the personal dynamics of fiction-writing by addressing four perennial questions that novelists are asked: Who are your influences? What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you too? and Is your fiction autobiographical?