Jennifer Egan, Winning

Yesterday, I wrote an item for Shelf Awareness about the launch of the Goodreads Book Club, which will feature Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I spoke to Egan for the piece, and it includes some reflections on her own involvement with book clubs as both an author and a reader, but I’d also spoken with her about the books she’s been reading lately, including Jessica Hagedorn’s Toxicology, The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer, and Emma Donoghue’s Room. “I thought it was spectacular, really, deeply unsettling,” she said of the Donoghue. “I felt one of those seismic shifts inside me reading it, which is rare for me.”

“For a long time before that, I was actually reading nineteenth-century novels,” Egan added. “I reread Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, and Bleak House in the last few months… One thing that I’m really interested in is the way that the nineteenth century has come to be regarded as this bastion of convention—when people mention the conventional novel, they’re often alluding to the nineteenth century—and yet, those books aren’t conventional at all. They were very loose and flexible and they had lots of things that I think would almost be regarded as experimental now. I’m kind of curious about that, and I definitely want to read more, but there’s a lot of recent stuff I want to catch up on, so I’m going to do that first.”

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11 May 2011 | interviews |

Read This: Of Lamb

The poet Matthea Harvey has collaborated with artist Amy Jean Porter to create Of Lamb, an “illustrated erasure” that retells the story of Mary and her little lamb using a Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb as its foundation. Harvey’s short poems were created by taking a page from the biography and stripping away all but a few words, around which Porter creates an illustration. I haven’t seen all the artwork for this, but what I have seen has been fantastic, so the judgment of Bitch‘s Lindsay Baltus that “Harvey and Porter have taken a book about a stuffy second-rate 19th century writer, written by an equally stuffy aristocrat-cum-biographer, and turned it into the very colorful tale of a woman’s deep love for her woolly friend” seems on the mark. And Porter’s original drawings will be exhibited at the P.P.O.W. Gallery beginning in late June, so I’ll probably go check them out!

10 May 2011 | poetry, read this |