Jennifer Egan has received a lot of attention in the past month as she was recently awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and chosen as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine.
The next item to check off her list: visiting Greencastle, Ind., to read her work as part of the James and Marilou Kelly Writer Series.
Egan, who has written four novels including the Pulitzer prize-winner, "A Visit from the Goon Squad," is also recognized for her distinctive work as a journalist for The New York Times, as well as for writing a collection of short stories.
Egan is known for her diverse writing topics; in her journalism, she has written stories about gay teenagers, homeless families and freed prisoners in Peru. She also has a wide range of fiction novels, from a coming-of-age tale in "The Invisible Circus" to "Look at Me," which features a modern terrorist as one of its central characters.
While on campus, Egan will read from "A Visit from the Goon Squad," her most recent novel. The novel follows an eclectic group of self-destructive characters mostly in the music business — but also includes a 15-year-old girl giving a PowerPoint presentation — who all go in directions they may not have expected.
"Although shredded with loss, ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad' is often darkly, rippingly funny," says a New York Times review. "Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart." In Egan's profile for "the 2011 TIME 100," Curtis Sittenfeld writes, "There is, apparently, no story that Jennifer Egan can't tell."
After "A Visit from the Goon Squad" was published in 2010, TIME magazine praised it writing that "it's as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused."
On Wednesday, Egan will host a craft talk at 2:15 p.m. in Asbury Hall room 202, as well as a reading and question and answer session at 7:30 p.m. in Meharry Hall in East College.