Jennifer Egan | |
|---|---|
 Egan in 2017 | |
| Born | September 1962 (age 61) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | |
| Genre | |
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | David Herskovits (m. 1994) |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | |
| www | |
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. [1]
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. [2] After graduating, she spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge, supported by a Thouron Award, where she earned an M.A. [3] [4] She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write. [5]
Egan has published short fiction in the New Yorker , Harper's , Zoetrope: All-Story , and Ploughshares , [6] 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. [5] 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." [7]
Egan received a Thouron Award in 1986, [4] was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. [8] In 2002 she wrote a cover story on homeless children that received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award. [5] 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. [9] Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. [5] In 2011 she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. [10] That same year she won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction), [11] the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, [12] and Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad. [13]
Egan won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Manhattan Beach . [14] The novel was also longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award. [15]
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," [ clarification needed ] an aspect also touched upon by Adam Kelly. [16] [17] 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. [18]
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". [19]
Egan lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. [20]
Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
John Simmons Barth was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history; Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer.
Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012). She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Jennifer Clement is an American-Mexican author. Clement has written several novels, including Gun Love (2018) and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), and published several collections of poetry. She was the first woman president of PEN International in 2015.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. The book is a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha. The book centers on the mostly self-destructive characters of different ages who, as they grow older, are sent in unforeseen, and sometimes unusual, directions by life. The stories shift back and forth in time from the 1970s to the present and into the near future. Many of the stories take place in and around New York City, although other settings include San Francisco, Italy, and Kenya.
The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, April 18, 2011. The Los Angeles Times won two prizes, including the highest honor for Public Service. The New York Times also won two awards. No prize was handed out in the Breaking News category. The Wall Street Journal won an award for the first time since 2007. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad picked up the Fiction prize after already winning the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award. Photographer Carol Guzy of The Washington Post became the first journalist to win four Pulitzer Prizes.
"Black Box" is a science fiction short story published in May 2012 by American writer Jennifer Egan. It was released in an unusual serialized format: as a series of tweets on The New Yorker's Twitter account over nine days beginning May 25, 2012. The story is in the form of "mental dispatches" from a spy living in the Mediterranean area in the near future.
Jennifer duBois is an American novelist. duBois is a recipient of a Whiting Award and has been named a "5 Under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Manhattan Beach is a historical novel by American writer Jennifer Egan. It was published in 2017 by Scribner. The National Book Foundation listed the book in their 2017 National Book Award Longlist in the Fiction category. Time magazine selected it as one of its top ten novels of 2017.
The Candy House is a novel by Jennifer Egan, published by Scribner's with a U.S. release date of April 5, 2022.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
