The Kraus Project

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A great American writers confrontation with a great European critic a personal and intellectual awakening.
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular medias manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely 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, a critic capable of untangling Krauss often dense arguments.

While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzens annotations soar over todays cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.

Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

Reviews

From the reviews of The Kraus Project:

Franzen is still saying something important. Also Kraus can be a joy you can understand why Franzen likes him, and he sees a dearth of such elegance today Sunday Times

The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly sceptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzens prose has an appealing briskness and polemical force, quite different in style from the high burnish of his long, deliberative, multi-layered literary novels as an exercise in controlled rage and as a celebration of and introduction to Karl Kraus it works just so Financial Times

Author Bio

Jonathan Franzen's work includes four novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, Freedom), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How To Be Alone), a memoir (The Discomfort Zone), and, most recently, The Kraus Project. He is recognised as one of the best American writers of our age and has won many awards. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.