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Arts & Entertainment

Library Puts a Bow on Adult Summer Reading Club

Jennifer Egan comes to town to discuss new book.

Fresh from a New York Times assignment in Peru, Jennifer Egan swooped into town as guest author at the Syosset Public Library’s first Adult Summer Reading Club wrap-up party on Aug. 18.  

A literary writer with an impressive body of work that includes short stories, novels and awards, Egan read excerpts from her latest novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.

With an eclectic energy and wit both in her writing and conversation, she shared the novel’s first spark of inspiration that took place in a public bathroom.   

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“While at lunch with my mother, I observed an open pocketbook with an exposed wallet someone had left behind in the ladies room," Egan recalled. "And I thought about the type of person who would steal that wallet and why.”  

That led Egan on a journey writing a music industry novel that cuts in and out of time; each chapter is told through a loose-gripped character’s voice as a record album with A and B sides. The story features Bennie, an ex-punk rocker-turned record executive, and his young employee Sasha, who likes to take people’s things and not give them back.    

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Audience member Zelda Katz, a fifth-grade teacher at Island Trees and Syosset resident of 56 years, said, “Jennifer was eloquent and generous in reading parts of the novel and sharing her process with us.” Katz said she looks forward to reading the novel now. 

Egan said her work never comes from personal experience. She doesn’t enjoy writing essays about her own life and doesn’t blog.

“Other than being a teenaged rock 'n' roll devotee, the process was two-pronged, both as a journalist interviewing music industry people as well as reading books on music.” The rest she created herself, peppered with what she refered to as “shame memories.”  

Reader Services librarian Susan Santa was delighted by the turnout and overall success of Syosset Library’s Adult Summer Reading Club.  “It was a great summer. We had 55 reading club members tonight enjoying refreshments and meeting Egan. We look forward to next summer.”  

It was a community effort with raffle prizes donated from some of the area’s finest businesses: Butera’s Italian Restaurant, Estilo Salon, Lonny’s Wardrobe, Mieka LTD, Optics Plus, Protass Gifts and ShopRite.  

Egan says she likes to “inhabit that space in fiction in which something is both totally crazy and makes sense.” In A Visit From the Goon Squad Bennie spends thousand of dollars on pure gold flakes, stuffing them in his mouth, and sprays pesticides in his armpits.    

Egan doesn’t usually write while listening to music, but found she “used certain genres of music as a locater in time and scene, particularly the Iggy Pop song ‘The Passenger.’"   

As a child in San Francisco, Egan said she loved making stuff up in imaginary games with sets of characters.  She was obsessed with biology and wanted to be a doctor, and then was fascinated with anthropology. 

Thankfully for her readers, she chose to toss the shovel aside and become a writer.   But, like an anthropologist, Egan digs up facts and reconstructs human life—in a way.

Egan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Other novels include Invisible Circus and Look at Me, and she's best-known for 2006's The Keep. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons, 7 and 9. 

“This is the first book reading I’ve ever been to. I enjoyed Jennifer’s expressive vocabulary and look forward to reading her work,” said Syosset resident Rena Damon, who escaped from her two young children for the Syosset Public Library party.  “I’m looking forward to the next meeting already.”  

Check out Jennifer Egan at www.jenniferegan.com and the Syosset Public Library at www.syossetlibrary.org.  

 

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