Jonathan Franzen is on Time's cover!

It's intriguing that even in these times, when literary fiction is reportedly on life support, Jonathan Franzen can be a cover story for Time!

The trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization: the closeup, the miniature, the microcosm. After the literary megafauna of the 1990s — like Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace, who was a close friend of Franzen's — the novels of the aughts embraced quirkiness and uniqueness. Franzen skipped that trend. He remains a devotee of the wide shot, the all-embracing, way-we-live-now novel.