Jennifer Egan Biography and latest books by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan (born September 6, 1962 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Brooklyn. She was raised in San Francisco. After she graduated from Lowell High School, Egan attended the University of Pennsylvania and St John\'s College, Cambridge. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons.

She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper\'s, Zoetrope All-Story, and Ploughshares,  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, and A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011.

Awards Egan bagged

Egan was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, 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. In 2011 she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Egan won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) and the Pulitzer Prize for A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Her works of fiction

•             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)

A Visit from the Goon Squad is told in discontinuous chapters that skip back and forth through time, from 1970s to the present. One chapter’s insignificant character becomes the protagonist of the next, and characters mentioned in passing in one account are pushed into the limelight in the subsequent chapters. So from a first chapter introducing Sasha, glamorous kleptomaniac secretary to the rock-music magnate Benny Salazar, we graduate to the inmost thoughts of Benny himself.

Egan’s next book, Look at Me, took her five years to write, and marked a 180 degree change in style and content. Packed with information-age satire, conspiracy thriller, teenage bildungsroman and drama it worryingly anticipates many of the public and private social changes we have been taking for granted.

As the story goes, a model has reconstructive surgery after a car crash and returns to New York unrecognisable to everyone know to her. Egan has built a potent and deeply peculiar fable of identity, technological mission creep, terrorism and the atrophy of personal relationships in a virtual age.

The New York Times refers to Jennifer Egan as a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist.