Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently chosen as one of President Obama’s favorite books of the year.

I got to know Jennifer shortly after the publication of A Visit From the Goon Squad, and since then we’ve had an ongoing conversation about the connections between writing and music. We’ve had a couple of these conversations in public. Here is a video of our conversation on September 14, 2022 at Sarah Lawrence College. (You can also watch it on YouTube here.)

Thank you, Jennifer.

And special thanks also to the Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, especially Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Madeleine Mori, Colleen Flaherty, Melissa Dittrich, Melisse Gelula, and the Sarah Lawrence College audio-visual team who recorded this.

Finally, thanks to all attended and all of you for watching and listening.