The Pool with Sam Baker (UK), 11/16/17
“As I writer, I’m looking for transport. I’m looking to live a different life.”
Interviews
Manhattan Beach: ABC
ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts (Australia), 10/29/17
“I got interested in the waterfront because I was looking at pictures of New York during World War II, and what astonished me was the omnipresence of the water. It was the conduit for human beings and everything they needed or used. It was the only way anything or anyone got anywhere.”
Manhattan Beach: Dallas News
Dallas News, 10/25/17
“I guess there was just something thrilling to me about dramatizing someone going under sea. It has such an archetypal storytelling aspect to it. It just felt inevitable.”
Manhattan Beach: City Pages
City Pages, 10/26/17
“I was really interested in New York during World War II, specifically what it felt like to sense the juggernaut of American global superpower beginning to form. What was that moment like?”
Manhattan Beach: CBC
CBC, 11/02/17
“It’s not enough to know what people wore or smoke or drove in a particular time and place.”
Manhattan Beach: Slate
Slate: “I Have to Ask”, 10/26/17
“There’s a feeling I have to have in order to write fiction: an excitement about a particular time and place.”
Manhattan Beach, The New Yorker
The New Yorker, 10/16/17
“Egan often dreams about finding a door that leads to an unknown room, like the one that Anna senses in metaphor. Sometimes the door leads to a garden. They are wonderful dreams. They are dreams about writing.”
Manhattan Beach: SF Gate
SF Gate, 10/23/17
“Lots of little details about the women and the things that happened to them found their way into the narrative. For example, the fact that the air smelled like chocolate — that was one of those details that a number of different people mentioned.”
Manhattan Beach: Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10/18/17
“I feel like every book I write requires its own voice in which to be told… The big challenge for me, with each book, is to find a new voice, with which to tell this very different kind of story.”
Manhattan Beach: Write the Book
Write the Book, 10/11/17
“I had long wanted to write a book about female power. This era seemed like a great one to explore. There were so many more restrictions on female behavior than there are now, and yet, as of the war, everything was open to question. Lives were changing.”
Manhattan Beach: The New Yorker Radio Hour
The New Yorker Radio Hour, 10/06
“Fiction has a magical quality to it, in the sense that no one really knows where it comes from. It’s like dreaming.”
Manhattan Beach: New York Times
New York Times Book Review Podcast with Pamela Paul, 10/06/17
“New York felt like a war zone for several months after 9/11… It made me think about the trajectory of American global power, and wonder about the future of that trajectory, but also, wonder about the past of it: World War II.”
Manhattan Beach: NPR
NPR, 10/05/17
“It was such a thrill to finally feel like I had imbibed enough information that it felt natural to me. It felt like time travel actually.”
Manhattan Beach: Good Reads
Goodreads, October 2017
“Anna just arose the way my characters always do. I started writing, and there she was.”
Manhattan Beach: Publisher’s Weekly Interview
Publisher’s Weekly, 09/15/17
“Until this novel, it had never crossed my mind to think about the collective memories of people alive at a certain time,” she says. “But who isn’t constantly thinking about their own past?”
Manhattan Beach: New York Times Interview
New York Times By the Book, 09/28/17
“If I try to read a book I’m not hungry for, I won’t enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I’ll devour it.”
Manhattan Beach: The Globe and Mail Interview
The Globe and Mail, 09/29/17
“For me, writing fiction is a process of imagining my way into what I don’t know.”
The Guardian, 9/24/2017
The Guardian, 9/24/2017
“…I’ve learned there is a feeling I have about things that are going to end up in my fiction, a kind of excitement. I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it’s a very New York dream, but I think it’s about writing – the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door. When I went on my first tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I had the sense that I was pushing through a wall. I was in a hidden city.”
Pop Matters 2/21/12
Pop Matters, 2/21/12
“I don’t like this so called high brow versus commercial dichotomy because I feel it isolates both camps in an area that I’m guessing no one particularly wants to be in.”
Seattle Met
Seattle Met, 1/26/12
“I just love not being attached to a machine…Maybe I lose something in terms of velocity, but I think I gain it in terms of freedom.”
BookTalk (Scottland)
BookTalk (UK) 1/10/12
“It feels like I am seizing upon details that suggest to me a life I don’t necessarily know, but is out there and has integrity. I could pursue it if I wanted to, but my goal is to keep my eye on this larger vision.”
On Point with Tom Ashbrook
NPR: On Point with Tom Ashbrook, 10/21/11
Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan on time, memory, and her latest, “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
CBC Podcast
Canadian Broadcoasting Corporation, 11/5/12
Jennifer Egan on the Best Pauses in Rock Music
Slate Magazine
Conversations with Slate Magazine’s Jacob Weisberg, 10/22/11
A video conversation in 3 parts
Huffington Post San Francisco
Huffington Post San Francisco, 10/10/11
“I made a study of what the counterculture consisted of, and it led me into other queries, like the impact of mass media on people’s inner lives, the longing for transcendence as a basic human yearning, the human tendency to wish ourselves in other times and places.”