For The Keep

For Look at Me

"Brilliantly unnerving....A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel."
—The New York Times

"Egan goes deeper, surprising us again and again. [She] limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel."
—Newsweek

"Intriguing....An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary....The novel's uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency."
—Time

"Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times....[She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness."
—The Washington Post Book World

"Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written....An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America."
—The New Yorker

"Look at Me is a complicated novel...but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers."
—Los Angeles Times

"Ambitious, swiftly paced....Egan writes with such shimmering élan that it's easy to follow her cast on its journey."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Prescient and provocative....The characters...jump from the pages and dare you to care about them....The prose is crisp and precise....The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click."
—Philadelphia Inquirer

"Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me...takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand....Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth."
—Salon.com

"Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process."
—Chicago Tribune

"Egan's rich new novel...is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images."
—The Nation

"Egan's take...is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true....Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving."
—Hartford Courant

"Breathtaking....combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives..... Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come."
—BookPage

"An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too."
—People

"Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] masterfully entwines the novel's secondary characters, building to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and making an incisive statement about our society's obsession with fame and glamour."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Riveting....As the book gains momentum, Egan's writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire....A remarkable study of our culture (where we all seem to be wearing masks) and of our palpable need to be known."
—O: The Oprah Magazine

"Egan has created a compelling world....With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines' churning waters with admirable skill."
—Seattle Weekly

"[A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. Egan...animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story."
—Newsday

"Dark, hugely ambitious....As riveting as a roadside wreck—and noxiously, scathingly funny."
—Elle

"Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egan's eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers."
—Us Weekly

"Fresh, accurate, clear and inventive....The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and behind the consciousness a writer who knows what she's doing."
—Francine Prose, The New York Observer

"This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptive—if not clairvoyant—writer whose disturbing vision...rings all too true."
—SF Weekly

"Egan's ability to move with ease between sincerity and satire sets Look at Me apart....Her authentic-feeling details give a sense of unusual immediacy."
—Vogue

for the Invisible Circus

"If there were justice in the world, no one would be allowed to write a first novel of such beauty and accomplishment."
—Pat Conroy

"Wonderful....words glide through her fingers and enter the pores like cool San Francisco fog"
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Mesmerizing....told with great assurance and power....Ms. Egan portrays the sisters with a quiet, heartbreaking clarity."
—New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant in its authenticity and overwhelming passion."
—Boston Globe Book Review

"A trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain."
—The New Yorker

"Evocative....an auspicious first novel for a very promising writer."
—The Washington Post Book World

"A lustrous, intelligent novel that ultimately is less about an era than about timeless human yearnings."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Wonderful....a triumph....told beautifully and energetically....by a writer who dances right along the scary edges of the material without ever losing control of it."
—The Boston Sunday Globe

"Jennifer Egan's The Invisible Circus is a real page-turner. Dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written, it is also a thoughtful evocation of the world fo 1960's European radicals, featuring some memorable characters of the past and present."
—Robert Stone

"Elegant and brilliant....spellbinding, heartbreaking, and told by a master."
—Cosmopolitan

"A wonderfully light, but finely tuned first novel. Jennifer Egan writes beautifully, her prose evocative and her plot considered and intriguing."
—Orlando Times

"Extraordinary....Egan's gift for storytelling captures the era with extreme ........Her writing is so fresh that it raises goose bumps and causes the heart to race. One can hardly wait for her next work."
—The St. Petersburg Times

"A startling book, full of unexpected words and sentences. And ideas. Jennifer Egan is a highly original, unusually intelligent writer."
—Alice Adams

"Adroit....The Invisible Circus deals with a number of compelling themes....[Egan] infuses this book with considerable intelligence and sensitivity."
—-Baltimore Sun

"Punches home like a blow to the stomach."
—Elle

"Egan attains an electrifying level of emotional intensity that translates into some the most vivid and original descriptions of place found in recent fiction."
—Booklist (starred review)

—"Searing....keenly observed....remarkable for its shapeliness and control....Egan's strongest suit may be her language."
—New York Newsday

for Emerald City

"Fiction writers are connoisseurs of memory...Jennifer Egan, a writer of understated elegance, is no exception, and it's clear that she retains keen memories of girlhood, that quicksilver time of eagerness and fear, vulnerability and conviction. She nmined this deep vein with great success in her bittersweet novel, The Invisible Circus, and it fuels her boldly modulated short stories, tales of displacement and blazing moments of truth...riveting, vaguely Hitchcockian...piercingly tender...outstanding."
—New York Times Book Review

"Lustrous...these stories sparkle with Egan's fresh imagery and precise renderings of mood and place...A writer of tremendous intelligence and grace."
—Philadelphia Inquirer

"Affecting accuracy...quiet but disturbing...She deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations."
—Time

"Masterful...Discovering Egan in the nineties is like discovering Ann Beattie in the eighties."
—Entertainment Weekly

"Distant settings and enticing writing...all bear the unmistakable stamp of a rising talent at work...Egan takes chances, ventures afar."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Immensely appealing...Told with dazzling insight and emotional daring."
—Elle

"A seamless collection...displays a gift for cool, clean, wrenching prose. Jennifer Egan has modern life down pat, and in this smartly crafted collection, she hands it over."
—People

"Astounding...The wistfulness of her characters, her transcendent prose-concise and lyrical-and the consistently high caliber of stories in this collection mark Jennifer Egan as a tremendous talent."
—Detour Magazine

"Egan displays wonderful empathy toward people who are standing at the brink of life; her tales celebrate the power of hope and redemption. Like a necklace in which every stone is a stunner, Emerald City will take your breath away."
—Glamour

"Accomplished...sharp eye and effortlessly graceful prose...She brings us to the transcendent place where reality becomes illusion."
—New York Newsday

"Ms. Egan's voice is boundless...The moment of change is so carefully constructed in each story, so fascinating in Ms. Egan's offhand way, that one recognizes a great new writer."
—The Dallas Morning News

"Egan displays a mastery of voice for a young writer...Her voice moves easily and accurately between the characters, her stories as beautifully crafted as they are darkly moving."
—Charlotte Observer

"Egan's writing is even more assured and convincing than it was in her debut novel, The Invisible Circus...a writer of admirable ambition and accomplishment."
—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

—"Each of these stories comes fully loaded with believable characters, a story arc, a resolution-all the satisfying elements that seem so elusive in modern fiction. Egan is a generous, gifted, and spellbinding writer."
—Booklist (starred review)