Vous pouvez modifier vos choix tout moment en cliquant sur le lien Tableau de bord sur la vie prive prsent sur nos sites et dans nos applications. So I sent him this new one, The Stylist. I remember this vividly. How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? she realizes. I mean, I do think that theres an existential misery at the heart of social media. The New Yorkers editors and critics choose this years essential reads in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. And it wasnt just loneliness. So there comes a point when he shares just his memories of this man to the collective. It was the first sign that in no way was I finished with the Goon Squad world. I put it in the mail, and two days later I had a message on my answering machine from Dan Menaker saying that he wanted to publish it. It was tissue-thin paper with tiny print, and it was so dense, and I remember the person on the elliptical next to me glancing over, and I could tell they were thinking, like, Wow, I cannot believe that is what she is using to entertain herself while she works out. Does that one have a contemporary setting? This was a strange interlude in my life. I mean, when I first got enamored of the idea of trying to write in PowerPointwhich I did for a chapter in Goon SquadI truly did not know what PowerPoint was. That is a kind of catalytic discovery for him that gets him out of his house and into action. Its now 2010, and he finds himself back at the East River at midnight, in the same spot where he stood with his friends all those years ago, and he is kind of flabbergasted to realize that he cannot remember much at all about that morning in 1993. I thought, It cant be real because there actually hasnt been enough time for the story to have even reached him. How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? So it was very disappointing to find not only that people didnt like it but that ultimately, when I could sort of gather my courage to read it, I found it pretty unreadable, too. In a way, my books are very different from one another, but I think the idea content is a real throughline. Photo by Getty Images Plus. The title of the book is clearly a warning, but I also think of it as more neutral. by Jennifer Egan RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022 Egan revisits some characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and their children to continue her exploration of what fiction can be and do in the 21st century. Absolutely. In fact, I have big questions about whether writing in the impulsive and intuitive way I do is possibly incompatible with the rigors of a good crime novel, which really, in the end, is all about design. I went to one in Park City, Utah, and I went to one in Squaw Valley. Has all of your work been read first by the writing group? All rights reserved. I can write really fast at the beginning, and the faster the better in a way, because Im looking not to think about it too much. But I found myself, in September, with no plan at all. The person who narrates the 1965 chapter, which describes how four young bankers leapt into the counterculture at a pot farm in the redwoods, is the daughter of one of the men. He gave me an introduction to George Plimpton, whom I dont think I had any real contact with, but someone in his office said, Were having a party, come. The Paris Review had what I guess are now these storied parties. I did not do that for Manchild in the Promised Land.. I ended up editing the literary magazine. Its so easy to say. Our consciousness is not like a camera. But I found that, actually, it felt impossible to get there without contending with the fifties. The Slate Group LLC. The chapter is an illustration of how human connection works, facilitated by technology, yet not so different from the Brazilian tribe studied by anthropologist Miranda Kline, who is dismayed to see her monograph monetized by Bix into a surveillance platform disguised as a community. If that book even worksand that is still a question mark. Ive never managed to exhaust it. 'The Candy House' is a brilliant portrait of intersecting Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. So thats what I was doing. The uploading and sharing part, called the Collective Consciousness, was more of an afterthought, but as is often the way with new tech, it soon became the main attraction. Thats so interesting. Never trust a candy house is also the advice of Miranda, who becomes an eluder, part of a movement of individuals who install a robotic proxy in their existing digital identity and then vanish into the offline world. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on whos telling the story. Chris starts out working for company seeking to turn what it calls stockblocks, narrative components from movies (Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense Into Protagonist; Crowd Rises to Its Feet in Unexpected Tribute), into mathematical formulae, although to what end he cant tell. And when I brought in this chapter, with its bells and whistles, they at first gently informed me that it was not really to their liking, and then more stridently said that when my narrator got, you know, ironic and winky with the reader they became angry. EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Egans best-selling novels A Visit from the Goon Squad and its sequel The Candy House are getting the TV treatment in a big way as A24 has optioned the rights to the books with Olivia Wilde attached to direct the series. Eleven years old, a little shrunken-looking in his beige uniform, nothing to hook your gaze if he Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem / Vistalux. All Rights Reserved. . The challenge is finding people who genuinely want the work to succeed and yet will be honest, and some of us in the group have been working together since the nineties. And then, actually, a critical element in that process was buying a notebook with eight rectangles on every page so that suddenly I was writing inside these small boxes, and that really helped me. It doesnt come easily to me. I love Don DeLillo. And Im so happy, actually, that I was like that, because I ended up having so many encounters and conversations that I wouldnt have had otherwise. The only frame I had was drug use and the fear of having destroyed my brain. If A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time and music, The Candy House is about experience and art, although the novels four sections (Build, Break, Drop, Build) refer back to the musical structures of Goon Squad. Around then I got the novel draft out and looked at it and thought, Oh, my God, what was I thinking? But Tom was kind of nonplussed. mesurer votre utilisation de nos sites et applications. Id been to Mexico, but that was really the only foreign country I had visited. Can we talk more about that? He was the literary editor at GQ at that point, and he was also teaching out of his living room. . But it really helped me. Their lives were what life was supposed to be, and my life was kind of an echo of that. Ive noticed with my kids and their friends that you dont find young people questioning adults about their lives very much. Also, Joyce Carol Oates, someone Ive read for a very long time and really admired. In one form or another, yes, because I was working on my first novel, The Invisible Circus, when I joined the class that became the writing group. And, when I wrote Black Box as a series of tweets, I was not good at using Twitter at all. So if you look too closely at the machine, it starts to dissolve a little, but I think the reason that it feels connected to this moment is that its analogous to what we already have. I read a lot of Shakespeare in England, and his storytelling abilities, putting aside the poetry and all the rest of it, were just so extraordinary. So there was something that was interesting there to be used later. And this work routine of writing for four hours every morningthat was enough time to get a lot done. So that was a really important book for me. And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. But the good part was that she paid me enough to live on, and I worked from 1 to 6 P.M. on weekdays. But now it just feels like a superpower. It was so thrilling. When I write a first draft, what Im holding onto is a sense of atmosphere and the physical environment where the piece is unfolding. I can feel my I.Q. So my literary pole stars would be Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellisonspecific books, like The House of Mirth, Invisible Manand probably The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare. By the way, I had met him at Squaw Valley, originally. So putting the words down made you more real? In retrospect, thank God. It comes up in the text twice, and the first time is in a somewhat comic context. The modelling thing was not going anywhere. Apparently, they were standing on a shore or a ship. As in so many books written in the fifties and sixties, the way women are written about feels jarring to a contemporary sensibility, but its still great. And Ive heard this actually from friends whose kids were abroad and said, Other people are having better years abroad than I am. And how do they know? The protagonist is new. Anyway, I assigned it to my class at Penn, having not reread it, and my T.A.s were horrified at first. Your most recent book, The Candy House, which came out last spring, picks up the stories of several of the characters in your 2010 book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The structure is similar, too, in that each chapter tells a story about a different character, but the chapters interlock and revolve around a kind of central core. A candy house, on the other hand, is just a trap. I love the way candy looks. Her formal invention, her willingness to try anything, her attention to language, and also the way her books are full of ideas, and shes grappled with eras. Probably page 5! I came with a suitcase on a plane alone. But the only thing that really had my attention atmospherically was Manhattan Beach. Then when I finished writing that, I finally started typing up The Candy House material, and a lot of it was really not good. So I let all of that go. 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