Author
Jennifer Egan
Birth Date
September 7, 1962
(63 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer known for her inventive storytelling and exploration of time, memory, technology, and human connection. Raised in San Francisco, Egan studied literature at the University of Pennsylvania and later spent time in England on a scholarship before beginning a career in journalism and fiction writing.
Egan gained critical acclaim with novels such as The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), and The Keep (2006), but achieved major international recognition with A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). The novel, structured through interconnected stories and shifting perspectives, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. She later returned to many of the same characters and themes in The Candy House (2022).
In addition to her fiction, Egan has written essays and journalism for major publications, and her work is celebrated for its originality, emotional depth, and experimentation with narrative form. Through her innovative approach to storytelling, she has become one of the leading voices in contemporary American literature.
Egan gained critical acclaim with novels such as The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), and The Keep (2006), but achieved major international recognition with A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). The novel, structured through interconnected stories and shifting perspectives, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. She later returned to many of the same characters and themes in The Candy House (2022).
In addition to her fiction, Egan has written essays and journalism for major publications, and her work is celebrated for its originality, emotional depth, and experimentation with narrative form. Through her innovative approach to storytelling, she has become one of the leading voices in contemporary American literature.
Books
The Candy House 2023
The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is...
Manhattan Beach 2018
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a Booklyn gangster who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by...
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told through a series of interconnected stories that move across time, place, and perspective, centering on the music industry and the lives it shapes. At its...
The Invisible Circus 2007
The political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen, in 1978. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a...
Emerald City 2007
These elegant and poignant stories—Egan's first collection—deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters—models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls—are united by their...
The Keep 2007
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside...
Look at Me 2002
She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads...