A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

2011′s book club pick was A Visit from the Goon Squad, the Pulitzer Prize wining novel from celebrated author Jennifer Egan. As well as winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, A Visit from the Goon Squad also received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and has been optioned by HBO for adaptation into a television series.

Some writers simply defy classification. While certain critics have tried to align Jennifer Egan with the metafictional exploits of the 1960s, the New York Times has praised her for “unusually vivid and convincing realism.” Even before Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, she had an avid following of readers who delighted in her obvious fun with literary tropes from detective fiction to the Gothic tradition. Hence the radical eclecticism of Goon Squad broke with the format of her previous novel, which broke with the novel before that. Which begs the question: what form will Egan’s next novel take? Jennifer Egan conversed with Wordstock Executive Director Greg Netzer on Saturday, October 8, 2011 at 1pm on the National Endowment for the Arts Stage.