Jennifer Egan
| Jennifer Egan | |
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 Egan at Occupy Wall Street, November 2011 |
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| Born | September 6, 1962 Chicago, Illinois |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Genres | Fiction, Novel, Short story |
| Notable work(s) | Look at Me (novel, 2001), A Visit From the Goon Squad (novel, 2010) |
| Notable award(s) | National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award |
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www.jenniferegan.com |
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Jennifer Egan (born September 6, 1962) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Egan's novel A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
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[edit] Background and career
She was raised in San Francisco. After she graduated from Lowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a two-year fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge.[1] She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares,[2] among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She has published one short story collection and four 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. Speaking about A Visit from the Goon Squad's genre, Egan said, "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. When discussing 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." [3]
[edit] Awards
Egan was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996,[4] and was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2004-05.[5] In 2011 she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[6]
Egan won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction)[7] and a Pulitzer Prize for A Visit From the Goon Squad.[8]
[edit] Works
- Emerald City (short story collection) (1993, UK; released in US in 1996)
- The Invisible Circus (novel) (1995)
- Look at Me (novel) (2001)
- The Keep (novel) (2006)
- A Visit From the Goon Squad (novel) (2010)
[edit] Reviews
Reviewing The Keep, The New York Times: Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist; she deploys most of the arsenal developed by metafiction writers of the 1960s and refined by more recent authors like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace — but she can’t exactly be counted as one of them. The opening of her novel, The Keep, lays out a whole Escherian architecture, replete with metafictional trapdoors, pitfalls, infinitely receding reflections and trompe l’œil effects, but what’s more immediately striking about this book is its unusually vivid and convincing realism.[9]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Mitchell, Margaret (2009), Hamilton, Geoff; Jones, Brian, eds., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work, Infobase Publishing, pp. 108–110, ISBN 0816075786
- ^ "Author Details". Pshares.org. http://www.pshares.org/authors/author-detail.cfm?authorID=438. Retrieved 2011-04-20.
- ^ Julavits, Heidi. "Jennifer Egan". BOMB Magazine. Summer 2010. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
- ^ "Jennifer Egan". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. http://www.gf.org/fellows/4045-jennifer-egan.
- ^ "Past Fellows". New York Public Library. http://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/fellowships-institutes/center-for-scholars-and-writers/past-fellows#2004.
- ^ Bosman, Julie, Deborah Eisenberg Wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, New York Times, March 15, 2011
- ^ Bosman, Julie, Jennifer Egan and Isabel Wilkerson Win National Book Critics Circle Awards, New York Times, March 11, 2011
- ^ Discussion of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" in relation to her work as a whole: Retrieved 20 April 2011.
- ^ Madison Smartt Bell (July 30, 2006). "Into the Labyrinth". The New York Times Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/books/review/30bell.html?ex=1156132800&en=5ebb02e43e212fd4&ei=5070.
[edit] External links
- Jennifer Egan's website
- Reviews & Scores for The Keep 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 of Jennifer Egan by Heidi Julavitz
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