THE KRAUS PROJECT - Couverture souple

Strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion and literature.

A hundred years ago, the writings of Viennese satirist Karl Krauswere among the most penetrating and prophetic in Europe: arelentless criticism of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though Kraus’s followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of alonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.

In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, and a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.

Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and graduated from Swarthmore College. He has lived in Boston, Spain, New York, Colorado Springs and Philadelphia. His other novels are The Twenty-Seventh City , Strong Motion , The Corrections and Freedom . He is also the author of two collections of non-fiction, How To Be Alone and Farther Away and The Discomfort Zone , a memoir. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in the New Yorker and Harper s , and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker . He lives in New York City.