Highs: In 2010, nine years after his hit novel The Corrections was released, Jonathan Franzen once again found critical and commercial success with the release of Freedom. The novel, a tale of a Midwestern family in crisis, spent ten weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and widely received rave reviews. In August, Franzen was featured on the cover of TIME, the first living American author to earn that distinction since Stephen King in 2000.
Lows: However, the attention that the release of Freedom received worked against Franzen when tens of thousands of copies of the novel had to be recalled in the U.K. for corrections, due to typesetting errors. As the novel had been so widely publicized, so too was the mistake.
—Megan Gibson