A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’ s tale of growing up, squirming in his own über-sensitive skin, from a “ small and fundamentally ridiculous person, ” into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he’ s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’ s fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between bird watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelingly engaged with the world we live in now. The Discomfort Zone is a wise, funny, and gorgeously written self-portrait by one of America’ s finest writers.