Describe your latest work. When I started working on Plant-Thinking in 2008, I had no idea that the project would turn out to be as broad as it did....
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The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's discussion of Jennifer Egan’s stunning new work, A Visit from the Goon Squad.In a satirical and oddly touching book, Egan brings to life the recent past, captures the confusions and ambiguities of the present, and speculates about the future of America.
wolfling34, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by wolfling34)
I love how the story weaves in and out of each of the character's lives, even going so far as to utilize power point presentation in on e chapter. Jennifer Egan masterfully uses every grammar possible to make this an exciting and thought provoking read.
tdjerram, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by tdjerram)
Best Book I Read In 2012!
Read print book & ebook & listened to audiobook at the same time.
Most books are much stronger in one format or another.
Egan's beautiful heartbreak of a classic for today's adults & tomorrow's children is wonderful in every format.
Made me laugh & cry & wish there were 100s more pages & tracks to be had when it ended.
Jennifer Egan's new novel is a fantastically inventive, intelligent, and fully realized exploration of music, art, and life. It even includes a chapter written in PowerPoint, which is actually a pleasure to read. A Visit from the Goon Squad is Egan's most accomplished work to date.
by Jill Owens
"Review"
by The Los Angeles Times,
“It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.”
"Review"
by The San Francisco Chronicle,
"Jennifer Egan is a rare bird: an experimental writer with a deep commitment to character, whose fiction is at once intellectually stimulating and moving....It’s a tricky book, but in the best way. When I got to the end, I wanted to start from the top again immediately, both to revisit the characters and to understand better how the pieces fit together. Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.”
"Review"
by Newsweek,
"For all its postmodern flourishes, Goon Squad is as traditional as a Dickens novel....Her aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age."
"Review"
by The Chicago Tribune,
"Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking....For all of its cool, languid, arched-eyebrow sophistication — that’s the part that will make you think ‘Didion’ — and for all of the glitteringly gorgeous sentences that flit through its pages like exotic fish — that’s the DeLillo part — the novel is actually a sturdy, robust, old-fashioned affair. It features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human.”
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Well-defined characters and an engaging narrative....Readers will enjoy seeing the disparate elements of this novel come full circle.”
"Review"
by Booklist,
"Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time....a hilarious melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel.”
"Review"
by Associated Press,
"Poignant....A nice reminder that even in the age of Kindles and Facebook, ambitious fiction is still one of the best tools available to help us understand the rapidly changing world....Her startling, apocalyptic take on the near future is all the more chilling for its utter plausibility, and brings the realization that Egan was up to much more here than just trying to reinvent the novel's format. You’ll want to recommend it to all your Facebook friends."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
From one of today's boldest writers comes a sly, surprising, and exhilarating novel about time, survival, and the electrifying sparks ignited at the seams of our lives by colliding destinies.
"Synopsis"
by Random,
Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.
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