Emerald City

Product Details

Synopsis

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.

Annotation

The theme of longing in all its forms--for change, for redemption, for travel outside the bounds of daily life to realms where anything seems possible--unites this masterful story collection. In various settings, Egan's characters--models, housewives, schoolgirls--seek transformation of the body and spirit, and transcendence of the borders of desire. 192 pp.

Publishers Weekly

Ranging in setting from provincial China to downtown Manhattan, the 11 short stories in Egan's first collection trace characters grappling with a wide variety of backgrounds and situations. But whether portraying the ennervated atmosphere of an exotic fashion shoot in Africa (``The Stylist'') or a teen's discovery of her father's secret life (``Puerto Vallarta''), Egan's writing is even more assured and convincing than it was in her debut novel, The Invisible Circus. In the chilling ``Sacred Heart,'' about a young girl's obsessive infatuation with her school's premier self-destructive rebel, Egan manages to sustain an atmosphere charged with menace without resorting to predictable shock effects. Many of the tales concern Americans abroad, characters who are disconnected from both their present environments and from the lives they've left behind. This theme finds its most persuasive expression in the dazzling ``Why China?'' in which a troubled San Francisco financial trader encounters the con man who once cheated him out of $25,000. With remarkable economy, Egan develops an uneasy cat-and-mouse game between the two men, as well as a rare depth of characterization for such a short work. While a smattering of the tales here seem like apprentice work by comparison-the title story, for instance, which concerns a hyper-trendy photographer's assistant in Manhattan-the collection as a whole showcases Egan as a writer of admirable ambition and accomplishment. (Feb.)

Biography

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, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Keep, as well as a collection of stories, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

She 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. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons.