“By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.”

American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer

Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Born in 1959, he is best known for his fiction, especially The Corrections and Freedom, which brought him wide critical attention and major literary recognition. The Corrections, published in 2001, won the National Book Award and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, while earning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a place on the shortlist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Freedom, published in 2010, was similarly praised and led to a Time cover that called him the “Great American Novelist.” His novel Crossroads appeared in 2021 and began a projected trilogy.