With Rick Kleffel for KBCZ and KSQD (NorCal), 4/29/22
The Candy House may think the future, the past and the present are all traps, but by any name you care to summon, they still taste sweet.
Interviews
GQ
GQ, with Clay Skipper, 4/11/22
“I was handwriting postcards to friends of friends, saying, ‘I have a reading, will you come?’”
PBS News Hour
PBS News Hour, with Jeffrey Brown, 4/29/22
“In a way, what the book does is simulate this experience of being in a collective consciousness and moving in and out of people’s minds.”
Get Lit
All Of It with Alison Stewart, 5/6/22
Get Lit, the WNYC book club: Live from WNYC’s Green Room, with audience questions:
NYTBR Podcast
The New York Times Book Review Podcast, with John Williams 4/29/22
“The only time any kind of radical structural form works is if I can find a story that can only be told that way. It involves a lot of waiting, and a lot of trial and error.”
Audible
Tricia Ford for Audible.com, 4/4/22
“I conceived of The Candy House as a book about space, and I think that’s why the word “house” is right in the title”
Poured Over, B&N
Barnes and Noble’s “Poured Over,” 4/7/22
“In the end, all the good ideas and fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there’s no emotional content.”
Kirkus
Tom Beer for Kirkus Reviews, 4/5/22
“I was a baseball mom for many years—I’d barely ever been to a baseball game before I had children, and I now have a pretty thoroughgoing knowledge of minor league baseball parks in America, and I’ve come to love baseball.”
Morning Edition
NPR’s Morning Edition with Leila Fadel, 4/8/22
“The Candy House cautions: be careful of things that at first appear inviting”
LA Times
Lynn Steger Strong in the Los Angeles Times, 4/3/22
“I guess to do something fully, you have to believe it will change everything.”
Time Magazine
Andrew Chow in Time Magazine, April 30th, 2022
“I know it’s all there in my mind—so why can I see some memories and not others?”
Vogue, April
Lauren Mechling in Vogue, April 2022
“It’s fascinating how to visit a place is to visit all the times you’ve been in that place. Spaces hold stories.”
Publisher’s Weekly, 2/28/22
Publisher’s Weekly, 2/28/22
“The sheer imagination, adventure, and majesty of Egan’s writing is impossible to quantify.”
The New Yorker Q&A, 12/27/21
The New Yorker Q&A, 12/27/21
The author discusses “What the Forest Remembers,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
Village Voice
Village Voice, 6/8/18
“A kind of gorging, gulping, transporting experience of being lifted out of my life: That’s what I’m looking for as a reader, and that’s what I hope to provide as a writer.”
CNN/Amanpour
Fresh Air
NPR’s Fresh Air, 12/18/17
For Novelist Jennifer Egan, ‘The Joy of Writing is Being Delivered Out of my Life.
Manhattan Beach: Lit Up
Lit Up, 12/13/17
“It’s a little like following trapped doors, or the suggestion of trapped doors. The first quickening was about the idea of New York during World War II. The next quickening was about the waterfront. The next quickening was about the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It felt like a real artifact of the war then.”
Manhattan Beach: Carnegie Shortlist Interviews
Carnegie Shortlist Interviews, 12/15/17
“My writing process, mostly by hand for fiction, is geared toward accessing my unconscious, from which, ideally, characters arrive wholly formed and usually even named. I feel less in the position of “creating” them than of recognizing them, inhabiting them, and trying to bring to the surface their contradictions”
Manhattan Beach: Guardian Live Books Podcast
The Guardian Live Books Podcast (UK), 11/21/17
“Writing entirely outside of my lifetime was extremely challenging, because the only things I actually use from my own life, is times and places that I know.”
Manhattan Beach: Fashion Magazine (Canada)
Fashion Magazine (Canada), 12/05/17
“With Manhattan Beach I was more interested in the trajectory of America as a superpower: where it started and the why and how and what that felt like. And then I just wanted to write a book that addressed the issue of female power, which I felt like I had never done.”
Manhattan Beach: Prospect Magazine
Prospect Magazine (UK), 12/11/17
“The obsession with time in Goon Squad was somewhat informed by my research for Manhattan Beach because I was talking to all these people at the end of their lives and they were reminiscing about their youths. It was impossible not to think about how short life is really.”
Manhattan Beach: Red Magazine (UK)
Red Magazine (UK), 10/16/17
“Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I’ve used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.”
A Visit from the Goon Squad: BBC Radio 4
Radio 4 Book Club (UK)
“I’m always interested in trying to make seemingly inconsistent moods or states exist.”
BBC Radio 4: Open Book with Mariella Frostrup
BBC Radio 4: Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, 11/23/17
“I started looking at images of New York during World War II, and the first thing that struck me was that it was all about the water. That was unexpected because you can live in New York for years, as I had then, and barely experience the water. I followed the water into the various worlds that come together in this book.”