Jennifer Egan Popular Books

Jennifer Egan Biography & Facts

Jennifer Egan (born September 7, 1962) is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president of PEN America. Early life After graduating from Katherine Delmar Burke School and Lowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. While an undergraduate, she dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating, she spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge, supported by a Thouron Award, where she earned an M.A. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write. Career Egan has published short fiction in the New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001. She has published one short story collection and six novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Egan has been hesitant to classify A Visit from the Goon Squad as either a novel or a short story collection, saying, "I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!" The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said, "I don't experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist ... One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose." Awards Egan received a Thouron Award in 1986, was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. In 2002 she wrote a cover story on homeless children that received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award. She was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2004–2005. Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In 2011 she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. That same year she won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad.Egan won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Manhattan Beach. The novel was also longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award. Reception Academic literary critics have examined Egan's work in a variety of contexts. David Cowart has read Egan's project in A Visit from the Goon Squad as indebted to modernist writing but as possessing a closer affinity to postmodernism, in which "she meets the parental postmoderns on their own ground; by the same token, she venerates the grandparental moderns even as she places their mythography under erasure and dismantles their supreme fictions," an aspect also touched upon by Adam Kelly. Baoyu Nie has focused, alternatively, on the ways in which "Egan draws the reader into the addressee role" through the use of second-person narrative technique in her Twitter fiction. Finally, Martin Paul Eve has argued that the university itself is given "quantifiably more space within Egan's work than would be merited under strict societal mimesis", leading him to classify Egan's novels within the history of metafiction.In 2013, the first academic conference event dedicated to Egan's work was held at Birkbeck, University of London, entitled "Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan". Personal life Egan lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. Bibliography Novels The Invisible Circus (1994) Look at Me (2001) The Keep (2006) A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) Manhattan Beach (2017) The Candy House (2022)Short fiction (partial list) Emerald City (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996) "Black Box" (short story; 2012, US; released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)References Further reading Kelly, Adam. "Beginning with Postmodernism." Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 (Fall 2011): 391–422. [On Look at Me] Mishra, Pankaj. "Modernity's Undoing." London Review of Books 33.7 (March 31, 2011): 27–30. [On A Visit from the Goon Squad] Strong, Melissa J. "Found Time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.4 (January 2018): 471–480. [On A Visit from the Goon Squad]External links Jennifer Egan's website Jennifer Egan at IMDb Jennifer Egan at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database "Jennifer Egan: By the Book". Interview. The New York Times, 2017. Reviews & Scores for The Keep Archived October 13, 2006, at the Wayback Machine at Metacritic.com Book Review at Boldtype.com "The Ghost in the Renovation" at This Old House website Reading report from Happy Endings with Peter Behrens and David Rakoff, published at bookishlove.net (Nov 2006) 2010 BOMB Magazine interview with Jennifer Egan by Heidi Julavits Archived October 16, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Paul Vidich (Spring 2010). "Jennifer Egan, An Interview". Narrative Magazine. Jennifer Egan: Chronological Bibliography of First Editions. Discover the Jennifer Egan popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jennifer Egan books.

Best Seller Jennifer Egan Books of 2024

  • Jennifer Egan synopsis, comments

    Jennifer Egan

    Gianluca Didino

    Anche se deve il suo successo italiano alla fortunata traduzione per minimum fax de Il tempo è un bastardo, il romanzo con cui nel 2011 ha vinto il Premio Pulizer per la narrativa,...

  • The Invisible Circus synopsis, comments

    The Invisible Circus

    Jennifer Egan

    The highly acclaimed debut novel from the bestselling, awardwinning author of A Visit from the Good Squad follows two sisters in the 1970sone lost, one seekingon "a trip that takes...

  • Right after the Weather synopsis, comments

    Right after the Weather

    Carol Anshaw

    “This timely novel takes on friendship, desire, fear, and vulnerability in one incisive, witty, and powerful package.” People“Astonishes with the force of its unexpected beauty.” T...

  • The Best American Short Stories 2014 synopsis, comments

    The Best American Short Stories 2014

    Jennifer Egan & Heidi Pitlor

    “The literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” Shelf Awareness for ReadersThe Best American Short Stories 2014 wil...

  • The Keep synopsis, comments

    The Keep

    Jennifer Egan

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”O, The Oprah Magazine The bestselling, awardwinning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad...

  • The House of Mirth synopsis, comments

    The House of Mirth

    Edith Wharton

    A literary sensation when it was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters ...

  • Toutes les lueurs de Londres synopsis, comments

    Toutes les lueurs de Londres

    Julia Kelly, Agnès Jaubert, Laywan Kwan & Chin-Yee Lai

    « Julia Kelly jongle avec dextérité entre mystère et détails authentiques, offrant une version charmante de l'histoire de celles qu'on nommait les Gunner Girls. » Kirkus Reviews« V...

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    If I Stay

    Gayle Forman

    The critically acclaimed, bestselling novel from Gayle Forman, author of Where She Went, Just One Day, and Just One Year. Soon to be a major motion picture, sta...

  • Manhattan Beach synopsis, comments

    Manhattan Beach

    Jennifer Egan

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionThe daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winnin...

  • Tuesday Nights in 1980 synopsis, comments

    Tuesday Nights in 1980

    Molly Prentiss

    “An intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale…As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing...

  • Manhattan Beach synopsis, comments

    Manhattan Beach

    Jennifer Egan

    Una trama hipnótica y una heroína inolvidable. Una novela rotunda, destinada por derecho propio a ingresar en el selecto club de las mejores obras literarias de nuestro tiempo.La e...

  • A Visit from the Goon Squad synopsis, comments

    A Visit from the Goon Squad

    Jennifer Egan

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER  NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of selfdestruction and redemption "fea...

  • Never Let Me Go synopsis, comments

    Never Let Me Go

    Kazuo Ishiguro

    NOBEL PRIZE WINNER From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twista moving, suspen...

  • Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves synopsis, comments

    Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves

    Rachel Malik

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2018'A surprisingly touching account of hidden lives forced out of the shadows' Sunday TimesOne day in 1940 Rene Hargreaves walks out on her ...

  • Island Rule synopsis, comments

    Island Rule

    Katie M. Flynn

    From the author of the “urgent and heartfelt” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel The Companions, a genrebending collection of interconnected short stories in the tradition of Jennifer...

  • Die Unteilbarkeit der Liebe synopsis, comments

    Die Unteilbarkeit der Liebe

    Jennie Fields

    Eine mutige Wissenschaftlerin, die sich ihren Platz in einer Männerwelt erkämpft. Und ein gefährliches Geheimnis, das für immer ihr Schicksal bestimmt.​Chicago 1950: Die mutige und...

  • Class Matters synopsis, comments

    Class Matters

    The New York Times

    The acclaimed New York Times series on social class in Americaand its implications for the way we live our lives We Americans have long thought of ourselves as unburdened by cl...

  • Florence Adler Swims Forever synopsis, comments

    Florence Adler Swims Forever

    Rachel Beanland

    “The perfect summer read” (USA TODAY) begins with a shocking tragedy that results in three generations of the Adler family grappling with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of fam...

  • Emerald City synopsis, comments

    Emerald City

    Jennifer Egan

    A collection of masterful stories from the bestselling, awardwinning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad: “Boldly modulated tales of displacement and blazing moments of truth.......

  • Asymmetry synopsis, comments

    Asymmetry

    Lisa Halliday

    A TIME and NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR New York Times Notable Book and Times Critic’s Top Book of 2018NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY Elle Bustle Kirkus Revie...

  • Understanding Jennifer Egan synopsis, comments

    Understanding Jennifer Egan

    Alexander Moran

    Understanding Jennifer Egan is the first booklength study of the novelist, shortstory writer, and journalist best known for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Visit from the Goon ...

  • Bootleg Stardust synopsis, comments

    Bootleg Stardust

    Glenn Dixon

    Daisy Jones & the Six meets Nick Hornby in this uplit debut novel about a young musician who auditions for a band and is suddenly catapulted into the wild world of rock and rol...

  • Second Draft of My Life synopsis, comments

    Second Draft of My Life

    Sara Lewis

    Fortytwo years and five books into her life, Charlotte Dearborn abandons her noncommittal boyfriend and her sinkingship writing career, and becomes an elementary school teacher. Su...

  • Innocents and Others synopsis, comments

    Innocents and Others

    Dana Spiotta

    From Dana Spiotta, the author of Wayward, Eat the Document, and Stone Arabia, “a brilliant novel…about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your ri...

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    The Two Houses

    Fran Cooper

    'Superbly written and utterly gripping' Daily Mail After an acclaimed career in ceramics, Jay herself has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband Simon move to th...

  • Home Fire synopsis, comments

    Home Fire

    Kamila Shamsie

    “Ingenious… Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.” The New York Times WINNER OF THE 2018 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR T...

  • Model Citizens synopsis, comments

    Model Citizens

    Daniel Shand

    'It has the pace and dynamism of a thriller, the metaphysical curiosity of the best science fiction and some judiciouslyplanted charges of wry humour' The Herald 'A dazzling novel'...

  • La casa de caramelo synopsis, comments

    La casa de caramelo

    Jennifer Egan

    Uno de los 10 mejores libros del año según The New York Times. La culminación de un gran proyecto narrativo iniciado con El tiempo es un canalla (Premio Pulitzer)La casa de caramel...

  • Look at Me synopsis, comments

    Look at Me

    Jennifer Egan

    NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST  In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, awardwinning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlott...

  • Chronicle of a Death Foretold synopsis, comments

    Chronicle of a Death Foretold

    Gabriel García Márquez & Gregory Rabassa

    NOBEL PRIZE WINNER  From the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes the gripping story of the murder of a young aristocrat that puts an entire societynot just a pair of...