Author of the award-winning novels The Corrections and Freedom, as well as essays, commentaries and translations, all-around all-American author, thinker and agenda-setter Jonathan Franzen kicks off the Newport Beach Library Foundation’s annual Witte Lectures with the talk, “Storytelling and the Modern World.” Our real world, as taken apart and reconstructed in his fictional one of fractured middle-class families, the displacement of national expectation and memory in souped-up and sardonic social realism, has made Franzen a both popular and critical success, and a public intellectual who boosters other writers and causes, mostly by retelling in close to the heart, close to the bone—including the funny bone—empathy-driven cautionary tales of people you might recognize, and should, because they are us.
Sat., Oct. 25, 6 p.m., 2014
