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 ]
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Written By: Katie Allen Little, Brown imprint Sphere has acquired a "shocking" debut novel about the murder of a little girl. Editorial director Catherine Burke acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) including audio and ebook in The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood from Laetitia... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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After a month of negotiations, Hearst has made an offer to buy 102 magazine titles from the French publisher. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-01-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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