Emerald City [Import] [Paperback]

JENNIFER EGAN (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: PICADOR; New Ed edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330335081
• ISBN-13: 978-0330335089
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,254,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, where her paternal grandfather was a police commander and bodyguard for President Truman during his visits to that city. She was raised in San Francisco and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge, in England. In those student years she did a lot of traveling, often with a backpack: China, the former USSR, Japan, much of Europe, and those travels became the basis for her first novel, The Invisible Circus, and her story collection, Emerald City. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of wacky jobs while learning to write: catering at the World Trade Center; joining the word processing pool at a midtown law firm; serving as the private secretary for the Countess of Romanones, an OSS spy-turned-Spanish countess (by marriage), who wrote a series of bestsellers about her spying experiences and famous friends.
Egan has published short stories in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta and McSweeney's. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, came out in 1995 and was released as a movie starring Cameron Diaz in 2001. Her second novel, Look at Me, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2001, and her third, The Keep, was a national bestseller. Also a journalist, Egan has written many cover stories for the New York Times Magazine on topics ranging from young fashion models to the secret online lives of closeted gay teens. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

Photo credit Pieter M. Van Hattem

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dry and terse and reliably right, March 3, 2010

By 

MZ (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emerald City (Paperback)

I love this writer, with her dry, terse voice that somehow tells all. As you read the stories, you can trust that something very real is going to happen; not something "fictional" or contrived, but an event such as could happen in real life. Not that the lives of her characters are like yours and mine; they all suffer from modern malaise of one kind or another; they all need love or else are so numb they don't know they don't have it.

One masterful story, "One Piece," chronicles an intense love needing to break out as a brother and sister strive for normalcy in an unimaginably beleaguered family. The pain of their circumstances would be unthinkable, but here we see decency, people trying to do the right thing, and then the extraordinary conclusion. This piece is uncharacteristically dramatic for Jennifer Egan, but it works beautifully and the story leaves you breathless.

Egan's language and her dialogue are reliably right. One the devices I like most about her is that she will tell the story in the present but will then fast-forward to the outcome years later. In her hands, this works perfectly: it's just what we want her to do.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My new favorite author, July 27, 2010

By 

Mr. "Hawlywood" (Eastern Washington) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Emerald City (Paperback)

It's tough to articulate why Jennifer Egan is my new favorite author -- I suppose she has edged out Ian McEwan, finally. This collection of short stories is a terrific way to get to know her as a writer. I've also really enjoyed "Look at Me" and "The Keep" from Egan, and look forward to "A Visit from the Goon Squad."

She is able to avoid clichés like hardly anyone else can, invoke emotional responses about the most unconventional concerns, make me smile and laugh at the strangest moments, and keep me turning pages.

Some would call her a postmodern writer, I'm sure, because of her constant pushing at the edges of convention. To me, she makes reading exciting again.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great writing, ok stories, May 25, 2011

By 

Someone Like You (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emerald City (Paperback)

The title of my review pretty much says it all. These stories are/were a promising start for a super-talented writer. You can see right off the bat that Egan can write well: the descriptions, the dialogue--it all crackles with energy. I haven't read her novels, but reading this collection makes me want to pick them up, even if, in the end, most of them were just average.