The Pulitzer prize-winning author discusses her follow up to A Visit from the Goon Squad and how imagining a new technology set her writing freeWhen Jennifer Egan bought her house in Brooklyn 20 years ago, it had been on the market for eight months. The owners were an elderly couple, and the place was distressed. “There were holes in the floor and the walls were drab,” says Egan, sitting in the kitchen of what is now a beautifully renovated property, full of lovely art and restored period details. Remembering how it was fills the 59-year-old novelist with a peculiar and very specific dread. “What really made it gloomy – and I’m very conscious of this – was that the family who’d lived here, the child had grown up, the parents had gotten old, and I think they’d stopped seeing it. There are moments when I think: is that happening now?”It’s the condition in which most of us live – after a while, we stop seeing our surroundings – and one against which Egan’s skill as a novelist is set. She is highly attuned to the falsifying effects of nostalgia, complacency, solipsism and ignorance of history, and to the delusions of uniqueness that dog every age. She is obsessed, for example, with the 1870s, “an amazing decade, because, except for the telegraph, almost none of the inventions we take for granted now – electricity, say – existed yet. And yet, 20 or 30 years later, there were cars. I think we underestimate the degree to which the change we experience is what it’s always been... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2022-04-16 08:00:03 UTC ]
At a time when black people are disrupting presidential campaign speeches nationwide in an effort to be recognized as human beings, "Negroland," the new memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, offers poignant insight into what it means to have been raised in the... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2015-09-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Nearly 900 authors across world back criticism of online retailer's business tactics in ebooks dispute with US publisher HachetteThey include some of the biggest literary names on the planet, among them Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Paul Auster, James Patterson and John Grisham; a Pulitzer prize... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-07-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Jaron Lanier will receive the 2014 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his writing and advocacy about 'the dangers involved when human beings are reduced to digital categories.' Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-06-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Few people understand the magic of libraries better than Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, but all is not well when it comes to digital lending. As the soon-to-be president of the Society of Authors, Pullman is leading the charge against publishing houses that may be shortchanging... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-06-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Alfred A Knopf) is among the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-04-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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By Joe Wilcox, Betanews At Noon ET today, News Corp. launched its original iPad newspaper The Daily. During an event that started an hour earlier, News Corp. president Rupert Murdoch said the target audience is the 50 million American users expected to have purchased iPads by end of this... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2011-02-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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