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Title details for A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - Available

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan
Roxana Ortega
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 2 copies available

This fantastically inventive, intelligent, and fully realized exploration of music, art, and life is a must-listen.

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    June 8, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780792771753
      • File size: 291069 KB
      • Duration: 10:06:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Roxana Ortega's style is an ideal match for Egan's latest. Using a series of interconnected vignettes, the author demonstrates how each of us stars in our own life story while also making appearances--from co-star to cameo--in the stories of others. Ortega's soft, almost whispery, presentation mirrors Egan's subtle character development while giving the listener the sense of confidences shared, reflections examined, and triumphs and weaknesses revealed. Ortega also proves herself adept at shifts of voice and emotion as the text swings through the multiple points of view of memorable characters over a fifty-year time span. A captivating listening experience. M.O.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 26, 2010
      In reading this novel of interconnected lives at the fringes of the music industry, Roxana Ortega freights her breathy voice with the moral confusion and sadness of Egan's disaffected, dismayed characters. A surprisingly supple instrument, Ortega's voice can drop to a gruff near-growl, and she craftily uses her range to convey the feeling of the bottom dropping out of the characters' lives. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 22).

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 22, 2010
      Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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