The nov­el­ist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describ­ing the rich and colour­ful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still man­ag­ing to por­tray the bleak real­ity of life for soci­ety at large (I loved The Cor­rec­tions).

Shang­hai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The New Yorker shows:

It was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world his­tory had asked, ‘Does some­body want to get into some really unprece­dent­edly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’”

via Raul Gutier­rez