Described by the New Yorker as “a realist with a speculative bent of mind, a writer of postmodern inclinations with the instincts of an old-fashioned entertainer,” Jennifer Egan has written about deep-sea divers during World War II, a sleeper terrorist, fashion models, and an aging hipster trapped in a haunted Eastern European castle. Her most celebrated novels, however, are about popular music and its power to transcend time and space. A Visit From the Goon Squad, published in 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Its multiple, time-traveling, interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, his troubled assistant. Egan’s 2022 novel, The Candy House, is a sequel of sorts, revisiting many of Goon Squad’s characters as they grapple with the ways technology has changed art and life in the past decade. Most recently, Egan published a deeply reported work of journalism in the New Yorker about efforts to combat homelessness in New York City. Egan will discuss her much-celebrated, wide-ranging work with Slate’s books and culture columnist, Laura Miller.
Free event
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama's favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in the New Yorker in September, 2023.
Laura Miller is books and culture columnist for Slate. She was a co-founder of Salon.com, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and many other publications. She is on the steering committee of the Word festival and lives in Blue Hill.