Author: Jonathan Franzen Jonathan Franzen, born in 1959, received the National Book Award in 2001 for his worldwide bestseller "The Corrections." He has also published the novels "The 27th City," "Strong Motion," "Freedom," and "Purity," the autobiographical book "The Discomfort Zone," the essay collections "How to Be Alone," "Further Away," and "The End of the End of the World," as well as "The Kraus Project" and the climate essay "When Will We Stop Fooling Ourselves." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Berlin Academy of Arts, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2013, he was awarded the WELT Literature Prize for his body of work, and in 2015, he received the EuroNatur Prize for his efforts to protect wild birds. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Translation: Thomas Piltz Thomas Piltz, born in 1949 in Munich, is a freelance photographer and translator. He has translated works by Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, and John Updike into German. He was awarded the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Translation Prize.