Pop Matters, 2/21/12
“I don’t like this so called high brow versus commercial dichotomy because I feel it isolates both camps in an area that I’m guessing no one particularly wants to be in.”
Seattle Met, 1/26/12
“I just love not being attached to a machine…Maybe I lose something in terms of velocity, but I think I gain it in terms of freedom.”
BookTalk (UK) 1/10/12
“It feels like I am seizing upon details that suggest to me a life I don’t necessarily know, but is out there and has integrity. I could pursue it if I wanted to, but my goal is to keep my eye on this larger vision.”
The Financial Times Magazine (UK), 12/9
“That was when things began to enter the realm of the hallucinatory. My sense of my reality, as I had known it, began to alter.”
NPR: On Point with Tom Ashbrook, 10/21
Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan on time, memory, and her latest, “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
Canadian Broadcoasting Corporation, 11/5
Jennifer Egan on the Best Pauses in Rock Music
Conversations with Slate Magazine’s Jacob Weisberg, 10/22
A video conversation in 3 parts
Huffington Post San Francisco, 10/10
“I made a study of what the counterculture consisted of, and it led me into other queries, like the impact of mass media on people’s inner lives, the longing for transcendence as a basic human yearning, the human tendency to wish ourselves in other times and places.”
Jennifer Egan talks with Greg Sanders at Google, 8/29
Wall Street Journal, 9/6
A Changed City: Reflections on 9/11
A Decade After Terrorist Attacks, New Yorkers Remember a ‘Surreal’ Moment, and a Renewed Commitment to Home
The Guardian (UK), 8/21
“I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/6
“At first, the characters were ‘little islands far apart — I didn’t see the land mass that connected them till later.'”
The Gothamist, 7/8
“I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s the price you pay for doing something different every time.”
San Jose Mercury News, 6/15
“I was a witness — not a hanger-on, just kind of a looker-on.”
San Francisco Chronicle, 6/14
“It feels just the right amount of different, so there’s no overlap at all with anything I’ve done before.”
The National, 6/6
“Ideally you would like it to seem true but not actually be true – because then it’s not satire, it’s just realism.”
New York Magazine: Vulture, 5/11
“I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves, that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship — that’s how hegemony works.”
The Big App Show, with Adam Curry 5/19
7x7SF, May 2011
“I think the city was in a sleepy hangover, and the echo of the ’60s was everywhere.”
The LAist, 5/10
“I think the industry, how books will be created and sold; there are legitimate worries there, but I’m not sure that the death of the book is on the list.”
The Guardian, 5/7
“I think there was a kind of clarity to being reduced to myself in this extreme way.”
The Los Angeles Times, 4/29
“I think the real surprise to me is that young people seem to respond to it.”
The Atlantic Wire: Media Diet, 5/3
“Nonfiction expands my knowledge, but fiction broadens my experience.”
The Days of Yore, 4/18
“I was interested in corporeal strangeness. I wish I could tell you it was about making people well, but I think it was more about wanting to cut them open!”
Bookmunch (UK) 4/11
“Quick views of someone you never get to know are so evocative.”
Aspen Public Radio (Part 2), 3/30
Entertainment Weekly: Shelf Life, 4/3
“I just didn’t expect such an idiosyncratic, decentralized book to prompt such strong enthusiasm.”
BBC Radio, The Strand, 3/25
NPR: Word of Mouth, 3/28
“Jennifer Egan, MS Powerpoint, and the Rock n ‘Roll Pause”
BBC News: Entertainment & Arts, 4/1
“I myself have been robbed many times in many ways – the most egregious being the time someone stole my wallet and then phoned me posing as a bank employee and got me to give her my pin number.”
Granta: Online Interview, 3/18
“I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily lunge to read ‘experimental’ work, because for me that word tends to connote abstraction, even a kind of severity, rather than a reading experience that might be fun.”
National Endowment for the Arts Podcast: Interview with Josephine Reed, 3/24
Psychology Today, 3/25
“Hang in there. If things don’t go your way in this round, they may very well the next.”
Aspen Public Radio (part 1), 3/23
Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, 3/24
“My cats are a big part of my work life. They’re in and out of here all day long.”
EMusic, 12/20
“One area I find weirdly unpleasant is actually telling my kids stories, like my father used to do.”
Kirkus Reviews, 12/15
“In a way, maybe [GOON SQUAD] is a response to the bewildered renegotiation of my relationship to the world.”
Irish Echo, 9/29
“Everything about the past…is a construction of that present. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. We’re all imagining it together.”
The Austinist, 10/1
“Hah! I wish I’d known how to use PowerPoint in time to help me with organizing this wacky book.”
Opening Lines (a website devoted to artists’ beginnings), 9/15
“I’m sorry to say that my crowning achievement [in high school] was a play about the group The Who. I don’t think that’s something I’ll be sharing with the world. I’m not even sure about where it is.”
Cooking the Books, with Emily Gould, 9/29
Egan assists in making chocolate-dipped macaroons while discussing cabbages and kings.
Mary Literary, 9/7
“At first I wanted to be a doctor…I was a kid who wanted to dig up graves and look at bodies.”
HITS Magazine’s “Daily Double,” 9/7
“The subconscious can be a very powerful force. And thank God for that, because without it, I would have a sub par IQ.”
Paper Cuts, the Times Book Review blog, 8/19
“At dinner with a friend recently, the subject of writers’ Web sites came up, and this friend mentioned Jennifer Egan’s website, which she said was “incredible” or “amazing” or some such superlative…I went home and, as soon as I had a spare moment, looked up Egan’s site. That “moment” turned into at least an hour.
The Morning News/Robert Birnbaum, 8/18
“Let’s put it this way: I would hesitate to call anything satire in our culture. Or futuristic.”
The Fader, 8/17
“To those of you who have found much of what you do soundtracked—and if you are on TheFADER.com, we’re guessing that is you—it’s a strongly moving book about time and growth, and what’s exciting about being young and old, and what’s difficult about both.”
Riff City/Channel Thirteen, 8/11
“Egan might be better than every music critic ever at describing both how music is made and what listening to music feels like.”
More Intelligent Life/The Economist, 8/5
“The miracle of “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is that nothing—not even a section devoted to an extended PowerPoint presentation—feels forced.”
NPR’s “The Takeaway,” with John Hockenberry and Lynn Sherr, 8/3
“If you’ve read any of Jennifer Egan’s previous work, you know that her writing style is rarely predictable. In her new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” she takes that unpredictability to a whole new level.”
New York Magazine’s Grub Street
An interview in which Egan unwittingly reveals that her vocabulary when discussing food on the phone is limited, and that her kitchen is a mess.
Huffington Post, 7/27
“Ok. She’s not always cozy. Instead she’s intuitive. Ironic. Intense. Insightful.”
NPR’s Morning Edition, 7/26
Interviewed by Lynn Neary
“According to Egan, the novel is a flexible and sturdy form, capable of withstanding the changes and challenges brought on by new technology. As a writer, she says she aims to hold on to the best of the past while having fun with the best of what’s new.”
The Millions, 7/12
“This is where Egan’s genius lies. She engages with philosophical questions and is formally daring, and yet, and yet!, her work is emotionally moving, the stories and characters always compelling.”
Dossier, 7/9
“As Egan’s fans know, her style varies from book to book and this collection is a testament to her wide-ranging mastery of voice and tone.”
Guttersnipe, 7/1
“Guttersnipe reached Jennifer Egan at home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where she was enjoying some time off following a book tour. Music journalism, Jagermeister as an artistic choice, and the future of books were among the topics.”
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 7/4
“I really wasn’t thinking of anything but breaking open a cliche I wanted to understand,” she says, “and out of this came this guy I was just nuts about.”
Guernica/a magazine of art & politics
Egan talks with Temple University’s Joshua Lukin, who knows her work better than she does.
The Daily Beast, 6/29
“Egan is an iconoclastic and original fiction writer, hewing to her own genre-bending path and creating fresh starts with each new book. Her finely tuned cultural antennae, her elegant language, and the unpredictability of her imagined universes make reading her work an adventure. Her work is supremely intelligent, psychologically acute, seriously playful, attuned to cutting-edge technology.”
St. Louis Courier-Journal, 6/28
“Part of the joy of reading “Goon Squad” is the thrill of recognition that comes from being fully introduced to a character who has been alluded to in a preceding chapter.”
Express from the Washington Post, 6/28
“In general, Egan is less interested in telling her own story than she is in describing the world from her own point of view.”
Bookotron, 6/28
“What I am frankly most curious about is how the novel will be received by the science fiction community.”
The Paris Review, 6/25
Drinking Diaries, 6/13
Philebrity, 6/17
“We wish they made more novelists like Jennifer Egan these days.”
Wall Street Journal, NY Region, 6/15
“Brooklyn-based novelist Jennifer Egan has accomplished the tricky feat of using metafiction techniques without sacrificing old-fashioned storytelling.”
The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, 6/10
Salon.com, 6/13
“Trying to “follow” the “plot” of “Goon Squad” is like trying to count the pores on your arm while tripping: tempting, yes, but a distraction from all the pyrotechnical fun.”
Bomb Magazine, Summer issue
Interview with Heidi Julavits
“Egan is a super-thinky writer in quasi-disguise, a writer who alchemizes Big Ideas into works of emotional intensity and architectural intricacy, the result being sneaky books you can recommend to those friends and relatives who demand “recognizable” characters and thumping storylines, but whom you hope might find tantalizing, beneath these vibrant entertainments, the buzzing circuitry of Egan’s mighty brain.”
Why is Good Writing about Sex so Rare? Discuss
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 4th, 2010