Overview
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER * With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption "features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human" ( The Chicago Tribune ) . One of the New York Times 's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century * One of The Atlantic 's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years 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. "Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart." -- The New York Times Book Review
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 6, 1962. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and Manhattan Beach, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2018. Her title, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, and Granta. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine and have won a number of awards.
Professional Reviews
"Pitch perfect. . . . Darkly, rippingly funny. . . . Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart." - The New York Times Book Review
"At once intellectually stimulating and moving. . . . Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay." - The San Francisco Chronicle
"A new classic of American fiction." - Time
"Audacious, extraordinary." - Philadelphia Inquirer
"A spiky, shape-shifting new book. . . . A display of Egan's extreme virtuosity." - The New York Times
"Wildly ambitious. . . . A tour de force. . . . Music is both subject and metaphor as Egan explores the mutability of time, destiny, and individual accountability post-technology." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"The smartest book you can get your hands on." - Los Angeles Times
"A rich and unforgettable novel about decay and endurance, about individuals in a world as it changes around them. . . . [Daum] is one of the most talented writers today." - The New York Review of Books
"It ends in the same place it starts, except that everything has changes, including you, the reader." - The New Republic
"Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking. . . . Features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn''t, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human." - The Chicago Tribune
"Egan's bravura fifth book samples from different eras (the glory days of punk; a slick, socially networked future) and styles (sly satire, moving tragedy, even PowerPoint) to explore the interplay between music and the rough rhythms of life." - Vogue
"Told with both affection and intensity, Goon Squad stands as a brilliant, all-absorbing novel for the beach, the woods, the air-conditioned apartment or the city stoop while wearing your iPod. Stay with this one." -Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered
"Brilliant, inventive. . . . Emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh. . . . Would that Marcel Proust could receive [a copy]. It would blow his considerable mind. . . . Expect to inhale Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then expect it to lodge in your cranium and your breastbone a good long while." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Frequently dazzling. . . . Egan's expert flaying of human foibles has the compulsive allure of poking at a sore tooth: excruciating but exhilarating too." - Entertainment Weekly
"If Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. . . . [A] triumph of technical bravado and tender sympathy. . . . Turn up the music, skip the college reunion and curl up with The Goon Squad instead." - The Washington Post
" A Visit From the Goon Squad should cement [Egan's] reputation as one of America's best, and least predictable, literary novelists." -Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
"Brilliantly structured. . . . We are pulled right in. . . . [Egan is] a boldly intellectual writer who is not afraid to apply her equally powerful intuitive skills to her ambitious projects." - Elle
"This is art at its best-as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once." - Austin American Statesman
"An exhilarating, big-hearted, three-headed beast of a story. . . . We see ourselves in all of Egan's characters because their stories of heartbreak and redemption seem so real they could be our own, regardless of the soundtrack. Such is the stuff great novels are made of." - Marie-Claire
"For all its postmodern flourishes, Goon Squad is as traditional as a Dickens novel. . . . [Egan's] aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age." - Newsweek
"Egan has accomplished the tricky feat of using metafiction techniques without sacrificing old-fashioned story-telling. . . . A Visit from the Goon Squad has a circuitous structure that seems almost designed for our Internet rewired brains." - The Wall Street Journal
