Vingt-Septi'me Ville(la) by Jonathan Franzen

Vingt-Septi'me Ville(la) by Jonathan Franzen

25th Anniversary Edition
Picador Modern Classics

Published in 1988, Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City is the debut novel of a writer who would come to define our times.

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism, paranoia. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

Jonathan Franzen (Western Springs, Illinois, 1959) was named one of the best young novelists in the United States by the prestigious magazine Granta in 1996. Until then, he had written the novels Ciudad veintisiete (1988) and Movimiento fuerte (1992), but it was the publication of Las correcciones (Salamandra, 2012) in 2001 that sealed his immense narrativo talent: he won the National Book Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Libertad (Salamandra, 2011), a novel that received widespread acclaim from a wide range of critics and experts from a variety of countries, was the final nail in the coffin for him in 2010. In Spain, he was awarded the Premio a la Mejor Novela del Año by the readers of the magazine Qué Leer. Cinco años más después, en otoño de 2015, la publicación dePureza reconmocionó a los lectores de habla inglesa, y lo consagró como uno de los grandes escritores norteamericanos de nuestra epocha In addition, Franzen is the author of five nonfiction works: How to Be Alone (2002), Zona templada (2006), Más afuera (Salamandra, 2012), The Kraus Project (2013), and El end del fin de la Tierra (Salamandra, 2019).