Jonathan Franzen

New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen: This week Jonathan Franzen:

"If you are a youngish graduate making a career in the media or arts anywhere in the English-speaking world, the chances are you will have bought The Corrections and helped make it the bestselling literary novel to date in the 21st century. It is also likely that you would enjoy 9 Adam Street, a private club in a Georgian town house just off the Strand.

It's a place for London's music and book trades, and as I descended through its dining room to the launch of The Discomfort Zone, Jonathan Franzen's memoir of his childhood, I passed faces that were familiar as types rather than indivi duals. Perhaps unfairly, I thought I needed only a quick look at their casually unbuttoned clothes and meals of 'authentic' English food of the kind few English people would dream of eating to know where they lived, what they believed and which potential partners they would consider acceptable. "