Before the Internet trained its full shaming power on brutal warlord Joseph Kony, it was a bad week online to be Jonathan Franzen. Well, another bad week.

Franzen might be the most acclaimed and the bestselling major American writer of his time, but he's about as popular online as an Occupy protester is at Davos. On one hand, Franzen's become the vehicle through which the literary world discusses big issues: the comparable attention paid to male and female writers, the value of reading online versus reading print books, the purpose of the novel in an electronic age, whether truly important fiction needs to be accessible to all or an experiment with language and form.

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This question came up recently in the response to an essay about Edith Wharton that appeared in the New Yorker. The author of the essay, Jonathan Franzen, has been a tennis ball of sorts in recent debates about the relative prestige awarded to male and female novelists: Batted around by the combatants as an example of male privilege, he's mostly refrained from weighing in with his own views. The Edith Wharton piece has offered that rare chance to assail him for what he has said, rather than what others have said about him.

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Franzen’s A Great American Writer and all but I don’t give a much of a damn about his opinions on anything (see: Edith Wharton obvi). Or I do. Is it really surprising that Franzen doesn’t care for Facebook or Twitter? His overall comportment does not suggest an affinity for the levity of social networking. I can’t really say I love Facebook, myself. It has become increasingly hard to make sense of the interface and I keep getting invited to parties and readings in Bali and Temecula and I don’t live in those places, so the experience is, at best, fragmented. At the same time, I don’t need to proselytize my dislike unless I’m on Twitter. Who cares? My opinion doesn’t matter nor does Franzen’s, though he is Very Fancy, so in the calculus of mattering, his irrelevant opinion is less irrelevant than mine. Math.

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The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin ("Game of Thrones") and Charlaine Harris ("True Blood"). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, "Next People," for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it's about time.

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The chair made its debut in "The Man in the Overstuffed Chair," a raw and moving essay Williams wrote in 1960 three years after the death of his father, Cornelius, the subject of the piece. “The best of my work, as well as the impulse to work,” wrote Williams in a breakthrough line, “was a gift from the man in the overstuffed chair.”

Forty years later, Franzen carefully exhumed the chair – color, context and corpulence intact – and wedged it into the heart of his Midwestern novel. Literary critics call this practice an "inter-textual reference," and while it’s true that Franzen’s novels are inlaid with semi-precious puns and nods to writers that he admires, such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, there is something more sacred, more ancestral, going on here than this dry academic term suggests. Williams and Franzen are frequently mentioned together for sharing St. Louis roots, but Williams is a less-discussed influence. Indeed, Franzen declined to talk about Williams and the blue chair for this story.

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The denizens of a small liberal arts college have a twitchy, uneasy relationship to fame. Those who once hoped to be literary stars themselves will often take a defiantly unimpressed stance. Having somehow been tapped to be Jonathan Franzen's host, I bent over backward to invite a certain English professor to the dinner, seating him next to the guest of honor, only to learn later that he was "not a fan." Bringing in a writer you admire is very much like bringing a new boyfriend home to meet the family. While you hope that they like him, and vice versa, you are resigned to being embarrassed.

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Celebrating the best and the worst of book trailers with a statuette of a golden sperm whale, last night's Second Annual Moby Awards were held at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. With categories like "Most Celebtastic Performance," "Best Small House Press Trailer" and "What Are We Doing to Our Children? (good or bad, you decide)," the ceremony is more tongue-in-cheek McSweeney's party than Paris Review gala.

According to Salon's senior book writer and Moby Awards judge Laura Miller, the best book trailer of the year didn't even take home a prize, though it was nominated in the category for best "Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object":

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Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," the year's most highly praised and talked about literary novel, was not among the fiction finalists announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards.

Nine years ago, Franzen won for "The Corrections" and his latest book was a sensation even before its release, the subject of a Time magazine cover story and rave reviews and so in demand that President Obama obtained an early copy. Oprah Winfrey picked "Freedom" for her book club, even though Franzen's ambivalence in 2001 over her choosing "The Corrections" had led her to cancel his appearance on her show.

Nominees on Wednesday included Peter Carey, whose "Parrot and Olivier in America" was a runner-up for the Man Booker Prize, and such well-regarded authors as Nicole Krauss ("Great House") and Lionel Shriver ("So Much for That"). The book awards also welcomed a rock star, Patti Smith, a nonfiction contender for "Just Kids," a memoir about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; and an attorney, poetry finalist Monica Youn ("Ignatz"), whose day job is with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York.

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American author Jonathan Franzen decided instead to give a thief freedom.

The novelist declined to press charges after his glasses were swiped at a launch party for his acclaimed new novel, "Freedom."

Franzen's British publisher, 4th Estate, on Tuesday confirmed the story which first appeared in The Bookseller magazine's website.

The Bookseller says the thieves crashed the party, claiming to work for a publisher; one then grabbed Franzen's spectacles, the other gave him a note asking for $100,000 for their return.

The thieves legged it, but one suspect was detained briefly by police, who returned the glasses.

Franzen's novel was hastily reprinted over the weekend after the publishers discovered the first 50,000 copies contained a number of typographical errors.

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What do you think of the phrase "Franzenfreude"?

I think in German it literally means "joy in Franzen." But I'm no stranger to literary envy and am in no position to deplore it in others.

There's been discussion in the Salon Reading Club about which character in "Freedom" most represents you. Which one is it?

All four characters draw equally on my experience of life, though I admit to having a particular fondness for the youngest of them.

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Is that stupid? Quite! Except there's a caveat. The phenomenon referred to by "Franzenfreude" -- the idea that the highbrow book world reserves its highest praise and most fawning attention for the works of men -- is absolutely true. It just happens that Jonathan Franzen is a terrible poster boy for that problem.

Franzen writes gorgeous women. Fleshed-out, interesting, three-dimensional, vivid women, women with brains. He writes for them, too, and perhaps most important of all, he reads them. When, at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel, someone asked him what he was reading, he replied, "Edith Wharton." To the follow-up question of what should we, his audience, be reading, he listed several books, all by female authors, including the "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," of which, up to that point, I hadn't even heard. (Then I read it. It was good!)

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This is not, however, as much Walter's story as it is his wife Patty's. One of the great ironies of the Oprah Book Club scandal of 2001 is how devoted Franzen actually is to creating complex female characters. "Freedom," I would argue, is written very much for women readers, much more than "The Corrections" ever was (so I'm not surprised that  Oprah has picked it for the her next Book Club), and much more for those readers than it is for the critics who are falling all over themselves to praise it (and I'm not bucking that trend). 

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As always, I'll toss a few topics out in this introduction, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments. Now's your last chance to get in any questions you may have for Jonathan Franzen. He'll being answering them next week.

I'm a little ambivalent about the ending of "Freedom." While it was definitely satisfying to see Walter and Patty reunited, part of me thinks it's not very realistic. But perhaps that's the point; if those characters had done what most divorced couples do and kept moving on to new lives, they'd be exercising the American-style freedom about which Franzen is clearly so ambivalent. He doesn't really show us how they manage to patch things up, which I find a bit mysterious, but I assume that it has something to do with both of them (but especially Patty) wanting to make right what they'd gotten so terribly wrong. Walter got the chance to fall apart (formerly Patty's job) and Patty got to rescue him. (And poor Lalitha got a bird sanctuary named after her.)

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Naturally, these unrealistic modern Achilles types must have some "likable" flaw, which is almost worse. It leads to the aesthetic of "quirkiness," which has brought such success to Jonathan Safran Foer and Wes Anderson (probably the two masters of the modern safe-quirk genre).

I might point out that "The Corrections" was in some sense a morality tale, the classic American story of trying to get all the kids home for one last Christmas with the family. Well, not all literature has to be dangerous or extremely challenging, but frankly when I think of most modern American "literary" books, the epithet "cowardly" comes to mind. Paul Auster is a good example of an obviously talented (or even very talented) writer who simply can't break free of certain strictures. All of his books have good sections and the prose overall is enviable, but the end result is unsatisfying.

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As before, I'm going to start the discussion with a few questions and observations, but, as always, feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just try to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after "Enough Already," so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 382 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. Finally, if you have questions for Jonathan Franzen himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end of the month.

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I'm going to kick off the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just remember to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after Page 187, so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 187 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. (Personally, I'm not the kind of reader who minds being tipped off to future plot points, so if you're like me, dive in.) And remember, if you have questions for Jonathan Franzen himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end.

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There's just one problem: The book may be an Updikean triumph that expertly limns the messy interior lives of a lost middle-class navigating a spiritually dead post-industrial America, but it's not available for purchase yet. And Obama didn't even pay for it.

According to Mark Knoller's Twitter, the nation's foremost source of Obama administration trivia:

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Whole books were dedicated to denouncing this trend and the master's of fine arts writing programs that were accused of popping out graduates who in turn popped out minimalist stories like a chain of identical and tasteless breakfast sausages. The days of minimalism's preeminence, if it ever truly had that, are gone, but the habit of raising a hue and cry about the state of contemporary fiction has proven addictive. We read different kinds of novels now, and so we have a different sort of critic to denounce them.

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Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

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