Jennifer Egan plays with time, wins Pulitzer
Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel about the passage of time set in the digital upending of the music industry.
Jennifer Egan, shown at her home in Brooklyn, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' on Monday.
Henny Ray Abrams/AP
Jennifer Egan's inventive novel about the passage of time, "A Visit from the Goon Squad," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday, honored for its "big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed."
Egan, 48, has been highly praised for her searching and unconventional narratives about modern angst and identity. Her other novels include "The Invisible Circus," ''Look at Me" and "The Keep."
Critics were especially taken with "A Visit From the Goon Squad," set in the digital upending of the music industry. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Critics Circle prize for the book, which experiments with format, notably a long section structured like a PowerPoint presentation.
"The book is so much about how change is unexpected and always kind of shocking," she said by phone. Egansaid she was inspired by Marcel Proust's sprawling novel "Remembrance of Things Past," which explored the passage of time.
"His book of time is all about how the work of time is unpredictable and in some sense unfathomable," she said. "So there's no question that winning a prize like this feel unpredictable and unfathomable."
Page 1 of 4
