“Behold 60 books that have been critical to me in some way. I’ve grouped them in three categories. The first I call “Literary DNA”: books that helped to shape my thinking about language and storytelling. I could be accused of stating the obvious, here (The Bible; the Odyssey), and yet I can’t imagine a table representing my personal reading history without these volumes on it. The second is books that have directly influenced my own. In the third category are books that may not have influenced me yet, but that I suspect—and hope—will in years to come."
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starting Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories and, most recently, the The Keep, which was a national bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines.
She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her most recent article, The Bipolar Kid, received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her newest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It is also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
