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Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her novel, Manhattan Beach, published in October 2017, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her last novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine.
Jennifer Egan's website
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Ok so tell us, what exactly constitutes a "visit from the goon squad"?
A: I knew the title of this book before I knew almost anything else. So I, too, entered the project in a state of wondering who the Goon Squad was, exactly. In addition to Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time I was working my way through as I wrote Goon Squad, my other primary literary (if you will) influence was The Sopranos, whose polyphonic structure I found deeply compelling. So I guess you might say that there are goons in my book's genome. The book is certainly full of people who feel beaten up in one way or anotherdisappointed, out of luck, gypped of what they once expected and still feel they deservebut these hardships aren't the work of particular enemies so much as life's vicissitudes. Without giving anything away, I'll say that the reader's understanding of who the real goon is accrues over the course of the book in much the way that my own comprehension of life's extreme brevity has overtaken me as I've pushed into my forties. And that's all I'm going to say!
In the thirteen chapters in this book we meet a large cast of characters and come to see, chapter...
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.
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