Emerald City and Other Stories

Description

These eleven masterful stories - the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan's characters, models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls, are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations. Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St John's College, Cambridge. She is the author of three novels, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling The Keep, and a short story collection, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. A Visit from the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011.

Egan displays wonderful empathy toward people who are standing at the brink of life; her tales celebrate the power of hope and redemption. Like a necklace in which every stone is a stunner, Emerald City will take your breath away - Glamour Astounding...The wistfulness of her characters, her transcendent prose-concise and lyrical-and the consistently high caliber of stories in this collection mark Jennifer Egan as a tremendous talent. - Detour Magazine Immensely appealing...Told with dazzling insight and emotional daring - Elle Affecting accuracy...quiet but disturbing...She deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations - Time Magazine boldly modulated short stories, tales of displacement and blazing moments of truth...riveting, vaguely Hitchcockian...piercingly tender...outstanding. - New York Times Book Review ...almost as good as her astounding novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is going some. - Observer Books of 2012