Jonathan Frantzen"s "The Harper"s Essay" is reprinted in "How To Be Alone", alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen"s writing - the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father"s struggle with Alzheimer"s disease and a rueful account of Franzen"s brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.