“This included The Lord of the Rings and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.” Readers will get a glimpse of Franzen’s first foray into multi-volume storytelling on Octothat’s when Crossroads is set for release. “Everything I loved as a young person I read three or four times,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. The description also offers a sense of what to expect from the trilogy as a whole: “By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. “įranzen has spoken about his own fondness for trilogies as a reader. Crossroads, Franzen’s sixth work of fiction and the first of a planned trilogy (called A Key to All Mythologies, after Edward Casaubon’s life’s work in Middlemarch maybe Franzen isn. Temple has written a longer breakdown of the announcement on Literary Hub, including the information that the trilogy’s title might be an homage to George Eliot’s Middlemarch.įranzen’s publisher has provided some information on the book, including the fact that Crossroads follows a Chicago-area family dealing with crises personal and societal in 1971.

2oyi3iiqZF - Emily Temple November 12, 2020 Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (1996), the Salon Book Award (2001), the New York Times Best Books of the Year (2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2002). Maybe he IS the leading novelist of his generation. Like The Corrections, Crossroads is a full-blown family story, this time set around five members of the Hildebrandt family in the early 1970s and the Chicago church of which father Russ is a. His fourth novel, Freedom, was published in the fall of 2010. Looks like Jonathan Franzen has finally completed Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies, letting Dodo off the hook. In fact, Crossroads is one of his best, overflowing with family crisis, morality, mundanity a nearly 19th century potboiler of ordinariness, across 600 pages, set in suburban Chicago.

Franzen crossroads trilogy