National Post (Canada), 1/10/12
“When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book.”
The Independent (UK), 12/11/11
“I can’t do this 514-page novel justice in 250 words. It’s funny and serious, dry, sly and wry. The writing is as pin-sharp as the perceptions. If you didn’t read it in 2011, make it your New Year’s resolution to read it in 2012.”
Everyday E-Book, 12/4
“Put the Needle on the Record: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad Rocks”
The Short Review, 8/1
“For Egan, even tossed-off moonlight energizes and illuminates.”
Paste Magazine 5/2
“Again, Egan has taken a leap of faith, trusting her audience will follow her, past the old nonlinear stand-bys such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, into even newer territory.”
London Evening Standard, 6/9
“A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know.”
Panel Review by Lisa Brown/SF Gate, 5/15
A panel review is even better than PowerPoint!
The Guardian, 4/2
“This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan’s name in the UK.”
The Telegraph, 3/26
“Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.”
London Review of Books, by Pankaj Mishra, 3/31
“Egan commemorates not only the fading of a cultural glory but also of the economic and political supremacy that underpinned it. The sense of an ending has always appeared to spur Egan’s inventiveness.”
The Irish Independent, 3/26
“A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tremendous novel: thoughtful, subtle, funny, wacky, energetic, profoundly authentic.”
BBC Saturday Review, 3/19
The group discussion of GOON SQUAD begins 13 minutes in (ie, almost at the end, after a long discussion of a Neil LaBute play)
The Independent (UK), 3/13/11
“The sparky disconnect between generations is sometimes rewired with brief but joyful connections.”
The Guardian (UK), 3/13/11
“This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices.”
Slate.com, 12/8
“Goon Squad is intricately crafted, wildly imaginative, and written with verve and grace…Give it to the superannuated goth in your life.”
The New Republic, 12/1
“It ends in the same place as it starts, except that everything has changed, including you, the reader.”
The New York Review of Books, 11/11
Reviewed by Cathleen Schine
“Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”
Austin American Statesman, 10/13
“This is art at its best — as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once.”
The Record: Music News from NPR, 8/17
The Novelist’s Advantage: Great Books About Music
The National (Abu Dhabi), 8/5
“Egan, too, has been swiftly, silently mounting an assault on the highest reaches of American fiction, beginning with early works like The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, and her remarkable 2006 novel The Keep. The Keep was a refreshing hybrid of postmodern playfulness and classical storytelling, and Goon Squad maintains its predecessor’s experimental daring while dramatically expanding its emotional reach.”
The Post and Courrier (Charleston, SC), 8/1
“Egan’s smart, unpredictable novel doesn’t pretend to have the answers. It just charts the shifting ratio between hope and dread, as the goon stalks.”
The National Post (Canada), 7/17
“Jennifer Egan’s stunning fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a collection of linked stories that don’t follow a conventional narrative structure but works beautifully because she takes chances that succeed.”
The Globe and Mail, 7/16
“In her brash beauty of a novel, Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire.”
Daily Beast/Taylor Antrim, 7/12
“A Visit From the Goon Squad should cement [Egan’s] reputation as one of America’s best, and least predictable, literary novelists.”
New York Times Book Review (cover review), 7/11
“Remarkable…Is there anything Egan can’t do?”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/27
“Ms. Egan’s concept is seductive, and her judicious marshalling of the right details of our contemporary life reveal a writer’s peripheral vision that sees the whole playing field.”
Bookotron, 6/28
“‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is first and foremost, fun and startlingly engaging to read.”
Kansas City Star, 6/27
“For all its sensory richness, social and psychological insights and brilliant layering of ideas and commentary, Egan’s time-bending tale is laced with suspense and punctuated by emotional ambushes of profound resonance.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 6/27
“The effect over 13 chapters is that of a collage, choral work or puzzle, reminiscent of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” or Robert Altman’s ensemble films.”
Time Magazine, 6/28
“It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused.”
People Magazine, 6/28
“Egan introduces a dizzying array of characters…but it all makes brilliant sense in the end. A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change–and what change and constancy mean in a Facebook–era world where ‘the days of losing touch are almost gone.'”
The New York Times, 6/21
“Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it.”
The Miami Herald, 6/20
“A Visit from the Goon Squad flares into flamboyant life. It mulls the sort of big-picture ideas good novels ought to ponder.”
The Boston Globe, 6/20
“Readers of her three previous novels and story collection have already discovered Egan’s unique sensibility and style, which defy easy classification and which some newcomers may find disorienting. Others will come away exhilarated and pleasantly breathless from the unpredictable ride.”
The Dallas Morning News, 6/20
“Egan takes a risk on an unusual structure and succeeds in moving the story forward while offering a welcome surprise.”
Bookotron, 6/12
“Jennifer Egan is back with ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ a brilliant and brilliantly enjoyable novel that manages to use the tropes of experimental fiction in a manner that make the book grippingly intense, funny, and endlessly enjoyable to read.”
Read the Review/Listen to a Podcast discussion between Rick Kleffel and Alan Cheuse
Bookpage, June 2010
“Egan’s scope remains simultaneously manic and highly controlled.”
Washington Post, 6/16
“If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile.”
The Observer’s Very Short List, 6/15
“How the private lives of these two characters—and plenty of others—intertwine makes for good, compelling reading, in this un-put-down-able novel.”
New York Newsday, 6/13
“Jennifer Egan’s bold, thrilling new novel examines the sea change from an analog world to a digital universe as it plays out in the lives of vividly imagined, richly complicated individuals.”
New York Press, 6/9
“It is a great work of fiction, a profound and glorious exploration of the fullness and complexity of the human condition.”
Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, 6/14
“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. It’s quite an original work of fiction, one that never veers into opacity or disdain for the reader.”
Entertainment Weekly, 6/9
“Egan’s expert flaying of human foibles has the compulsive allure of poking at a sore tooth: excruciating but exhilarating, too.”
The Associated Press, June 9
“A Visit From the Goon Squad” in its way resembles the kind of social novel that Charles Dickens once cranked out regularly. It features more than a dozen disparate but vivid characters, from a powerful businessman to a Latin American dictator to a group of teenage punk rockers; and the action ranges over five decades and three continents.
“But Egan has abandoned the straightforward narrative that marks most socially minded novels in favor of a series of linked stories that jump around in time and space and between a set of characters with sometimes tenuous connections. It calls to mind nothing so much as the fragmentary experience of surfing the Web.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10
“In her audacious, extraordinary fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan uses the pop-music business as a prism to examine the heedless pace of modern life, generational impasses, and the awful gravity of age and entropy.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9/8/10
“I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know — we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh.”
Newsweek, 6/3/10
“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.”
Chicago Tribune, 6/6/10
“Jennifer Egan’s decision to render portions of her new novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (Knopf), as a PowerPoint presentation is: Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking.”
San Francisco Chronicle, 6/6/10
“Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.”
Los Angeles Times, 6/6/10
“It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.”
BookPage:
A DAZZLING SPIN THROUGH TIME
Read The Review
Fans riding high from Jennifer Egan’s critically acclaimed The Keep have much to look forward to in her new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which turns away from the neo-gothic and mind-bending while retaining the unexpected humor and postmodern breadth of her earlier work.
– Jillian Quint
Vanity Fair/Hot Type:
“Jennifer Egan’s slamming multi-generational San Francisco saga, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, pogoes from the romantic, Mohawked youth of the 70s to the present-day hell of selling out.”
Marie Claire Radar: Books/TV
Need to Read
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
Discover your inner Joan Jett (without the requisite hangover) in a new, hell-raising novel
Warning: Those who have a hard time imagining the words *punk rocker* and *great novel* together in a sentence should stop reading now. The great novel in question is Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, an exhilarating, big-hearted, three-headed beast of a story that explores the secret lives of some seriously screwed-up people, most of whom have been in love either with punk rock or with someone who sang it…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–even when the hearts in question belong to aging rock stars.
Elle Magazine
May 07, 2010
Read The Review
A novel that’s a globe-trotting, decade-leaping romp about music-industry people with fashionable foibles
— Lisa Shea
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY (Starred Review):
Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive and well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie’s one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan’s overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same. (June)
BOOKLIST (Starred Review):
Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time and escalation of technology’s covert impact. Following her diabolically clever The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades as they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the underworld of Naples, Italy. Her boss, New York music producer Bennie Salazar, is miserable in the suburbs, where his tattooed wife, Stephanie, sneaks off to play tennis with Republicans. Obese former rock-star Bosco wants Stephanie to help him with a Suicide Tour, while her all-powerful publicist boss eventually falls so low she takes a job rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator. These are just a few of the faltering searchers in Egan’s hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel. As episodes surge forward and back in time, from the spitting aggression of a late-1970s punk-rock club to the obedient, socially networked “herd” gathered at the Footprint, Manhattan’s 9/11 site 20 years after the attack, Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reordering our world. — Donna Seaman
Kirkus (Starred Review):
“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.
Egan (The Keep, 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.
Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values.
“Brilliantly unnerving….A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel.”
— The New York Times
“Egan goes deeper, surprising us again and again. [She] limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel.”
— Newsweek
“Intriguing….An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary….The novel’s uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency.”
— Time
“Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times….[She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness.”
— The Washington Post Book World
“Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written….An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America.”
— The New Yorker
“Look at Me is a complicated novel…but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Ambitious, swiftly paced….Egan writes with such shimmering élan that it’s easy to follow her cast on its journey.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“Prescient and provocative….The characters…jump from the pages and dare you to care about them….The prose is crisp and precise….The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me…takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand….Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth.”
— Salon.com
“Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process.”
— Chicago Tribune
“Egan’s rich new novel…is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images.”
— The Nation
“Egan’s take…is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true….Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving.”
— Hartford Courant
“Breathtaking….combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives….. Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come.”
–BookPage
“An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too.”
— People
“Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] masterfully entwines the novel’s secondary characters, building to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and making an incisive statement about our society’s obsession with fame and glamour.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“Riveting….As the book gains momentum, Egan’s writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire….A remarkable study of our culture (where we all seem to be wearing masks) and of our palpable need to be known.”
— O: The Oprah Magazine
“Egan has created a compelling world….With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines’ churning waters with admirable skill.”
— Seattle Weekly
“[A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. Egan…animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story.”
— Newsday
“Dark, hugely ambitious….As riveting as a roadside wreck — and noxiously, scathingly funny.”
— Elle
“Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egan’s eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers.”
— Us Weekly
“Fresh, accurate, clear and inventive….The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and behind the consciousness a writer who knows what she’s doing.”
— Francine Prose, The New York Observer
“This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptive — if not clairvoyant — writer whose disturbing vision…rings all too true.”
— SF Weekly
“If there were justice in the world, no one would be allowed to write a first novel of such beauty and accomplishment.”
— Pat Conroy
“Wonderful….words glide through her fingers and enter the pores like cool San Francisco fog”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing….told with great assurance and power….Ms. Egan portrays the sisters with a quiet, heartbreaking clarity.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant in its authenticity and overwhelming passion.”
— Boston Globe Book Review
“A trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain.”
— The New Yorker
“Evocative….an auspicious first novel for a very promising writer.”
— The Washington Post Book World
“A lustrous, intelligent novel that ultimately is less about an era than about timeless human yearnings.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Wonderful….a triumph….told beautifully and energetically….by a writer who dances right along the scary edges of the material without ever losing control of it.”
— The Boston Sunday Globe
“Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus is a real page-turner. Dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written, it is also a thoughtful evocation of the world fo 1960’s European radicals, featuring some memorable characters of the past and present.”
— Robert Stone
“Elegant and brilliant….spellbinding, heartbreaking, and told by a master.”
— Cosmopolitan
“A wonderfully light, but finely tuned first novel. Jennifer Egan writes beautifully, her prose evocative and her plot considered and intriguing.”
— Orlando Times
“Extraordinary….Egan’s gift for storytelling captures the era with extreme ……..Her writing is so fresh that it raises goose bumps and causes the heart to race. One can hardly wait for her next work.”
— The St. Petersburg Times
“A startling book, full of unexpected words and sentences. And ideas. Jennifer Egan is a highly original, unusually intelligent writer.”
— Alice Adams
“Adroit….The Invisible Circus deals with a number of compelling themes….[Egan] infuses this book with considerable intelligence and sensitivity.”
— Baltimore Sun
“Punches home like a blow to the stomach.”
— Elle
“Egan attains an electrifying level of emotional intensity that translates into some the most vivid and original descriptions of place found in recent fiction.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Egan’s ability to move with ease between sincerity and satire sets Look at Me apart….Her authentic-feeling details give a sense of unusual immediacy.”
— Vogue
“Searing….keenly observed….remarkable for its shapeliness and control….Egan’s strongest suit may be her language.”
— New York Newsday
“Each of these stories comes fully loaded with believable characters, a story arc, a resolution-all the satisfying elements that seem so elusive in modern fiction. Egan is a generous, gifted, and spellbinding writer.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Egan’s writing is even more assured and convincing than it was in her debut novel, The Invisible Circus…a writer of admirable ambition and accomplishment.”
— Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Egan displays a mastery of voice for a young writer…Her voice moves easily and accurately between the characters, her stories as beautifully crafted as they are darkly moving.”
— Charlotte Observer
“Ms. Egan’s voice is boundless…The moment of change is so carefully constructed in each story, so fascinating in Ms. Egan’s offhand way, that one recognizes a great new writer.”
— The Dallas Morning News
“Accomplished…sharp eye and effortlessly graceful prose…She brings us to the transcendent place where reality becomes illusion.”
— New York Newsday
“Egan displays wonderful empathy toward people who are standing at the brink of life; her tales celebrate the power of hope and redemption. Like a necklace in which every stone is a stunner, Emerald City will take your breath away.”
— Glamour
“Astounding…The wistfulness of her characters, her transcendent prose-concise and lyrical-and the consistently high caliber of stories in this collection mark Jennifer Egan as a tremendous talent.”
— Detour Magazine
“A seamless collection…displays a gift for cool, clean, wrenching prose. Jennifer Egan has modern life down pat, and in this smartly crafted collection, she hands it over.”
— People
“Immensely appealing…Told with dazzling insight and emotional daring.”
— Elle
“Distant settings and enticing writing…all bear the unmistakable stamp of a rising talent at work…Egan takes chances, ventures afar.”
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Masterful…Discovering Egan in the nineties is like discovering Ann Beattie in the eighties.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Affecting accuracy…quiet but disturbing…She deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations.”
— Time
“Lustrous…these stories sparkle with Egan’s fresh imagery and precise renderings of mood and place…A writer of tremendous intelligence and grace.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“Fiction writers are connoisseurs of memory…Jennifer Egan, a writer of understated elegance, is no exception, and it’s clear that she retains keen memories of girlhood, that quicksilver time of eagerness and fear, vulnerability and conviction. She nmined this deep vein with great success in her bittersweet novel, The Invisible Circus, and it fuels her boldly modulated short stories, tales of displacement and blazing moments of truth…riveting, vaguely Hitchcockian…piercingly tender…outstanding.”
— New York Times Book Review
ivillage: Stuff We Love
October, 2006
“When Halloween comes around this year, forgo the tired old horror movies and curl up with National Book Award nominee Jennifer Egan’s new novel The Keep…Part gothic romance, part ghost story, and peppered with Egan’s startling insights into the role of communication and loneliness in contemporary life, this is one brainy page-turner that will have you leaving the lights on at night.”–Amy Shearn
The Atlantic Monthly
October, 2006
Read an Excerpt of the review
“Egan’s third novel…is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.”–Joseph O’Neill
The Boston Phoenix
September 26, 2006
“At the heart of The Keep is a love story with so much pull, its bruises can be found on almost every page. Like an old spirit who refuses to go away, this is one fantasy that haunts long after its physical end.”–Sharon Steel
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
September 15, 2006
Read the Review
“Jennifer Egan is one of the most gifted writers of her generation…The risk-taking writer has created an original, postmodern take on the gothic thriller.”–John Marshall
The Seattle Times
September 15, 2006
Read the Review
“An experimental novel wrapped in gothic velvet…as tautly paced as a classic thriller.”–Moira Macdonald
The Philadelphia Inquirer
September 14, 2006
“Filaments of suspense fan out in all directions…The whole book is surprising; you just don’t realize how surprising until the end…The book itself is a stronghold of imaginative story telling, the last stand of the Gothic novel.”–Dorothy Lehman Hoerr
The Boston Globe
September 3, 2006
“If Kafka’s Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll’s Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan’s Danny…No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles…the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting.” –Merrill Kaitz
The Onion
August 31, 2006
Read the Review
“With The Keep, Egan breaks the mold from page one. Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect…[The book] maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity…And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror…outstanding.” –Donna Bowman
San Francisco Chronicle
August 23, 2006
Read the Review
“[A] remarkable piece of work…Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (“The Mysteries of Udolpho”) and Horace Walpole (“Castle of Otranto”), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It’s tricky; but it’s a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off.” –Ron Antonucci
The New Yorker
August 21, 2006
“This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites…Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous–imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests–and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics.”
People Magazine
August 21, 2006
*Critic’s Choice* (Four stars) “Dazzling…Egan gets everything right–from the convolutions of the strung-out male mind to the self-deceptions of a drug addict–and her skill will keep you marveling at the pages that you can’t help turning.” –Francine Prose
Chicago Tribune
August 13, 2006
“The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of reading “The Keep” so great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again, an impulse that is grandly rewarded, so masterful is Egan’s foreshadowing, so nuanced and mysterious is the story. Gothic and chthonic, “The Keep” is satirically sublime.” –Donna Seaman
The Oregonian
August 6, 2006
“Half tall tale, half literary experiment, Jennifer Egan’s “The Keep” is more than the sum of its parts…Egan lets her writing romp…How she weaves the story of these four people together–and the unexpected links between them–is fascinating.” –April Henry
Rocky Mountain News
August 11, 2006
“The complicated plot comes together seamlessly, marvelously. The characters crackle with life…their pain palpable and strangely inevitable. It’s a novel that engages and haunts the reader, a psychological who’s-who, who-dun-what and how-do-they-go-on. The Keep is a fast and furious read, a perfect summer novel.” –Ashley Simpson Shires
USA Today
August 10, 2006
Read the Review
“Arresting…insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives…strange and beautifully drawn, a place well worth visiting.” –Susan Kelly
Time Out
August 3-9, 2006
“The Keep is an example of literature responding to current events not with a mirror but an artful mindfuck.” –David Bahr
The New York Observer
August 7, 2006
Read the Review
“Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive…Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood, if unexpected, kind of sense.” –Nan Goldberg
Elle Magazine
August 2006
“Visionary…at once hyperrealistic and darkly dreamed…With Egan’s powers of invention running at full tilt, The Keep reads like a twenty-first-century mash-up of Kafka, Calvino, and Poe, in which the absurd meets the surreal meet the unspeakable–to edgy, entertaining effect.” –Lisa Shea
O: The Oprah Magazine
August 2006
“Roiling and captivating…As you finish this novel, part horror tale, part mystery, part romance, the mind lingers over it, amazed by how vivid Egan has made it, how witty, how disturbing, how credible, and yet how utterly fantastic.”–Vince Passaro
Vanity Fair
August, 2006
“Jennifer Egan spins a haunting tale…Egan’s brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of gothic-castle novels with the dead-on realism of a prisoner’s life, to create a book worth keeping.”–Elissa Schappell
The New York Times Book Review (Cover)
July 30, 2006
Read the review
“Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist…Egan sustains an awareness that the text is being manipulated by its author, while at the same time delivering character and story with perfect and passionate conviction. Very few writers, in our time or any other, have been able to bring that off…the dazzling presentation makes us believe that it really is a matter of life, death and salvation…The result is a work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.”–Madison Smartt Bell
The Los Angeles Times
July 30, 2006
“A novel as daring as Jennifer Egan’s “The Keep” makes us think hard about one of the murkiest mysteries of all: the mystery of perception, that uncertain border where reality and imagination meet…irresistibly suspenseful…A novel like “The Keep” shows us what it’s like to live outside of today’s categories and to exist in unreal situations, in dreams, in confusion, in the experiences of others.”–Joanna Scott
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
July 30, 2006
“Jennifer Egan is a contemporary American storyteller in the vein of Stephen King or “The Sopranos” scriptwriters. Her latest novel, a slightly gothic tale of love and the (possibly) supernatural, is a pleasure to read…Egan’s eye and ear for contemporary America places the whole saga too close to home for fantasy.” –Emily Carter Roiphe
The Washington Post (Media Mix)
July 30, 2006
“Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and cliches–from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story–is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page.”
Amazon.com
June, 2006
read review
“In Jennifer Egan’s deliciously creepy new novel, two cousins reunite twenty years after a childhood prank gone wrong changed their lives and sent them on their separate ways…To reveal too much would ruin the story, just know that The Keep is a wonderfully weird read–a touch experimental in terms of narrative, with a hefty dose of gothic tension and mystery–balanced by an intimate and mesmerizing look at how the past haunts us in different ways. “
Booklist
5/19/06
“Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story.”
Library Journal
5/16/06
“An engrossing narrative told in prose that’s remarkably fresh and inventive.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
5/15/06
“Intelligent, challenging and exciting… The characters’ emotions are so real, the author’s insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away.”