Jennifer Egan | |
|---|---|
 Egan in 2017 | |
| Born | September 1962 (age 62) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | |
| Genre | |
| Notable works |
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| 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 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]
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Leila Fuad Aboulela is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela's works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).
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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.
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.
