A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan · first published 2010
83% recommend17% neutral
Why HN recommends it
An experimental, inventive novel that shifts across time and point of view. Its writing and inventive formats stand out, making it a fit for readers who enjoy ambitious literary fiction.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compuls
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I highly recommend A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0036S4C6G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
on “A machine will serve you a free Big Mac” ↗Not a movie, but according to the wiki article linked a little further up the book “A Visit From The Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan has metamodern qualities, and I heartily recommend reading it. It’s fantastic. The section in the format of a PowerPoint presentation about her brother that one of the main character’s…
on “Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)” ↗…'The Nickel Boys' by Colson Whitehead I'd argue surpasses most of Steinbeck's more popular canon (Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row etc...). A magnificent novel in the very best of the american tradition. 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan is probably tied for the best 21st Century Pulitzer winner with Jayne Anne Phillips' 'Night Watch' -both Steinbeck-esque in their charting of social mores in the face of an ever-changing…
on “Books by People – Defending Organic Literature in an AI World” ↗…composed as sub-140 character chunks. It was released on Twitter tweet-by-tweet and collected in a New Yorker science fiction special last year. She is an impressive and experimental writer (check out her "Visit from the Goon Squad") who does a great job with this form. The thought-sized chunks give the story a lot of space and cleverly invites the reader to imagine a lot of context. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_(Jennifer_Egan_story)
on “What I would have written” ↗Really enjoyed her "Visit from the Goon Squad". Highly recommended.
on “Jennifer Egan's Fiction and Visions of the Future” ↗…rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way. At least they've gotten better about showing…
on “A Penny for Your Books” ↗