Egad! You'll Want to Read Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan, a Chicago native born September 7, 1962, is a U.S. novelist, short story writer and journalist who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood considered kind of chic but less often described with the dreaded "hipster" moniker than other quarters of our nation's largest metropolis.
Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, an often startling tale of the life stories of several people tied to the music industry, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. A hallmark of Goon Squad is Egan's formal innovation in storytelling; the author even tells stories by Powerpoint presentation and through time signatures on musical tracks.
She made waves in the late 2010s in a variety of ways, notably when her science-fiction short story, " Black Box," was released 140 characters at a time via Twitter feed, before it actually appeared in The New Yorker magazine's print and tablet editions.
As a journalist, Egan wrote a long piece on bipolar disorder in children for The New York Times Magazine in 2008 that aroused some upset feelingsand discussion of these issues.
In 2011, when Egan won the Pulitzer for Goon Squad, there was a literary kerfuffle. Many observers expected Missouri native Jonathan Franzen to win for his bestselling book Freedom.
After winning the Pulitzer, Egan gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal and made some remarks about a young college student who had unfortunately made a name for herself as a plagiarist of other writers' fiction in the so-called "chick lit" genre:
Look at The Tiger's Wife. There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I'm not saying you should say you've never done anything good, but I don't go around saying I've written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.
Egan's comments provoked various shades of ire from other women writers, one of whom, Jennifer Weiner, has a bit of a reputation for picking fights online. (If it's not Jennifer Egan, Weiner's after French-American novelist Claire Messud or that easiest of targets, the always feather-ruffling Franzen.)
Perhaps one of the most interesting reactions to Jennifer Egan's Wall Street Journal interview has a Greene County connection. A brief essay called "In Defense of Chick Lit" happens to have been written by Jamie Beckman, a native Springfieldian and University of Missouri alumna who now writes for national magazines and internet outlets, when she's not expressing her Mad Men fandom.
You can find all 18 Jennifer Egan items in the Springfield-Greene County Library collection right here.
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