Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan
Egan at the 2017 Texas Book Festival
Born (1962-09-07) September 7, 1962
Chicago, Illinois
Occupation novelist
Citizenship United States
Alma mater

University of Pennsylvania (BA)

Cambridge University (MA)
Genre Fiction, Novel, Short story
Notable works Look at Me (novel, 2001), A Visit from the Goon Squad (novel, 2010), Manhattan Beach (novel, 2017)
Notable awards National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award
Spouse David Herskovits (25 June 1994 -- present)
Children 2
Website
www.jenniferegan.com

Jennifer Egan (born September 7, 1962) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.[1] Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the President of the PEN America Center.[2]

Background and career

Egan was born in Chicago but grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Lowell High School, she majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. While an undergraduate, Egan dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom.[3] After graduating, Egan spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award where she earned an M.A.[4][5] She came to New York in 1987 and worked a strange array of jobs while learning to write, such as catering at the World Trade Center.[6] She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares,[7] among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and turned into a movie starring Cameron Diaz.[6] 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, 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."[8]

Awards

Egan at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival

Egan received a Thouron Award in 1986,[5] was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996.[9] In 2002 she wrote a cover story on homeless children that received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award.[6] 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.[10] Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.[6] In 2011 she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[11]

Egan won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction),[12] the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,[13] and Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad.[14]

Academic interpretation

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 postmodern writing, 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.[15][16] 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.[17] 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".[18]

Partial bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

  • 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)

Reviews

Reviewing The Keep, The New York Times said:

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 new 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.[19]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Cooke, Rachel (2017-09-24). "Jennifer Egan: 'I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap'". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-04-25.
  2. ↑ "Current Board of Trustees (2018-2019)". PEN AMERICA. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  3. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (3 November 2010). "Inside the List". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
  4. ↑ Mitchell, Margaret (2009), Hamilton, Geoff; Jones, Brian, eds., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work, Infobase Publishing, pp. 108–110, ISBN 0-8160-7578-6
  5. 1 2 Whiteman, Sean (July–August 2011). "Surprises Are Always The Best". The Pennsylvania Gazette. 109 (6).
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Amazon.com: Jennifer Egan: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle". www.amazon.com. Retrieved 2018-04-25.
  7. ↑ "Author Details". Pshares.org. Retrieved 2011-04-20.
  8. ↑ Julavits, Heidi. "Jennifer Egan", BOMB Magazine, Summer 2010. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
  9. ↑ "Jennifer Egan". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 2011-05-11.
  10. ↑ "Past Fellows". New York Public Library.
  11. ↑ Bosman, Julie, Deborah Eisenberg Wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, New York Times, March 15, 2011
  12. ↑ Bosman, Julie, Jennifer Egan and Isabel Wilkerson Win National Book Critics Circle Awards, New York Times, March 11, 2011
  13. ↑ "Jennifer Egan – Novelist and Journalist". jenniferegan.com. Retrieved 2018-04-25.
  14. ↑ Discussion of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" in relation to her work as a whole: Retrieved 20 April 2011.
  15. ↑ Cowart, David (2015-05-27). "Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 56 (3): 252 in 241–254. doi:10.1080/00111619.2014.905448. ISSN 0011-1619.
  16. ↑ Kelly, Adam (2011-09-21). "Beginning with Postmodernism". Twentieth-Century Literature. 57 (3–4): 391–422. doi:10.1215/0041462X-2011-4009. ISSN 0041-462X.
  17. ↑ Eve, Martin Paul. ""Structural Dissatisfaction": Academics on Safari in the Novels of Jennifer Egan". Open Library of Humanities. 1 (1). doi:10.16995/olh.29.
  18. ↑ "Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan — Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London". www.bbk.ac.uk. Retrieved 2016-01-02.
  19. ↑ Madison Smartt Bell (July 30, 2006). "Into the Labyrinth". The New York Times Book Review.

Further reading

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