Publication Order of Goon Squad Books
| A Visit from the Goon Squad | 2010 |
| The Candy House | 2022 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Invisible Circus | 1994 |
| Look at Me | 2001 |
| The Keep | 2006 |
| Manhattan Beach | 2017 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Emerald City | 1993 |
About Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan (born 7 September 1962) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she has published six novels and one collection of stories.
Egan was born in Chicago and went to school in San Francisco, where she attended Lowell High School. She read English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and then spent two years at St John’s College, Cambridge, on a Thouron Award, taking an MA. She moved to New York in 1987 and worked at a series of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while she learned to write. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story and Ploughshares, and her journalism in The New York Times Magazine.
Her story collection “Emerald City” was published in Britain in 1993, three years before its American release. Her first novel, “The Invisible Circus”, was adapted into a film of the same name in 2001. “Look at Me” (2001), a finalist for the National Book Award, centres on Charlotte Swenson, a fashion model trying to revive her career in New York after a car accident and reconstructive surgery to her face. “The Keep” (2006) is about two cousins drawn into a business venture that stirs up an episode from their past.
“A Visit from the Goon Squad” (2010) is built from thirteen interrelated stories whose characters are all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant Sasha. It moves between the 1970s, the present and the near future, and one chapter is laid out as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan herself has been reluctant to label it either a novel or a story collection. It also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. “The Candy House” (2022) is usually listed with it as the second Goon Squad book.
“Manhattan Beach” (2017), a historical novel, was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2018. Egan received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996 and was president of PEN America from 2018 to 2020. She lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with her husband and two sons.
Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).