Jennifer Egan: The Goon Squad's Brooklyn Chronicler

Jennifer Egan Photo Credit: Britannica

A note from our founder

Our fifth tribute in this new chapter goes to a novelist who has spent her career finding new shapes for fiction to take — from a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint deck to a Pulitzer-winning meditation on time itself. Jennifer Egan calls Brooklyn home, and it shows up in her work in ways both direct and quietly structural.

From Chicago to Cambridge

Jennifer Egan was born on September 6, 1962, in Chicago, Illinois, and raised primarily in San Francisco. She went on to study English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge, before building a career that would repeatedly reinvent what a novel could look like.

A Master of Structure

Egan is best known for her inventive narrative structures and sharp examinations of how technology, memory, and the passage of time reshape human relationships. Few contemporary novelists take as many structural risks, or land them as consistently.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

That structural daring reached its fullest expression in 2010 with A Visit from the Goon Squad, a genre-defying novel-in-stories that includes a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, cementing Egan as one of the defining novelists of her generation.

Journalism and Brooklyn Life

Beyond her fiction, Egan is an accomplished investigative journalist, writing long-form pieces on subjects like homelessness and mental illness for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction

• The Invisible Circus (1994) — Egan's debut novel, following a young woman who travels through Europe in the 1970s tracing the footsteps of her deceased, radical older sister.

• Emerald City and Other Stories (1993/1996) — A collection of sharp, globally minded short stories exploring themes of travel, youth, and displacement.

• Look at Me (2001) — A National Book Award finalist that satirizes internet culture, identity, and the fashion industry through a model undergoing facial reconstruction.

• The Keep (2006) — A gothic, metafictional mystery centered on two cousins renovating a medieval castle in Central Europe.

• A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) — A panoramic, multi-POV masterpiece tracking a music executive, his assistant, and a circle of associates over several decades as they encounter the relentless march of time ("the goon").

• Black Box (2012) — An experimental science-fiction spy thriller originally published as a series of tweets on The New Yorker's Twitter account.

• Manhattan Beach (2017) — A historical noir set during World War II, focusing on Anna Kerrigan, who becomes the first female ship repair diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

• The Candy House (2022) — A sibling sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad that explores a futuristic world where tech allows humans to upload and share their collective memories.

READ EGAN

Start with A Visit from the Goon Squad for the book that changed what people expected a novel to do, or Manhattan Beach if you'd rather begin at the Brooklyn Navy Yard itself. Either way, you're reading a writer who keeps finding new structures for the same old, urgent questions about time and memory. Get the book.

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