The Discomfort Zone

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen''s tale of growing up squirming in his own über-sensitive skin from a small and fundamentally ridiculous person into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he''s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s the effects of Kafka''s fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity or the web of connections between bird watching his all-consuming marriage and the problem of global warming Franzen is always feelingly engaged with the world we live in now. The Discomfort Zone is a wise funny and gorgeously written self-portrait by one of America''s finest writers.