Illinois Authors

Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.

Bookclub-in-a-Box, [England] : ©2012.

In the 1970s, Bennie Salazar was the bassist in a San Francisco punk band, the Flaming Dildos. Decades later, he finds his career as a record executive and his relevance in the industry are slowly fading? while his tastes remain the same, the music scene and the technology that creates it change rapidly around him. Sasha is his younger assistant, loyally keeping an increasingly forgetful Bennie on track, but struggling with her own aimlessness and a bad pick-pocketing impulse. Each chapter of the book is its own brilliantly crafted story, offering perspective on peripheral characters from Sasha?s college friend Rob, to Bennie?s destitute former band mate Scotty, to an entire chapter laid out as a PowerPoint presentation by Sasha?s daughter, Alison. Moving from the 1970s to the 2020s and several places in between, A Visit From The Goon Squad shows how every encounter has the potential to change a life?s direction, but no matter what you do, time is the one goon you can never avoid. The Bookclub-in-a-Box guide for Egan?s book will spark discussion around the following topics: Egan?s innovative structure and narrative techniques, the passing of time and its relationship to memory, characters in past and future, technology and a quick glimpse into the music industry then and now. Every Bookclub-in-a-Box discussion guide includes complete coverage of the themes and symbols, writing style and interesting background information on the novel and the author.

AudioGO, North Kingstown, RI : ℗2012.

Eleven stories dealing 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.

Anchor Books, New York : 2007.

Eleven stories on the vagaries of life. In Why China? a successful stockbroker yearns for the days when he was poor, in Passing the Hat, a wife observing a woman sleep around with men, is shocked to discover her own husband was one of them, while The Watch Trick compares the lives of two army friends, one who settled down, the other who didn't. By the author of The Invisible Circus.

N.A. Talese/Doubleday, New York : 2001.

Model Charlotte Swenson returns to Manhattan after recovering from a devastating car accident in her Illinois hometown. She finds that she can't restart her career and floats invisibly through the New York fashion world.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family with the Great Depression underway. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished.--

Anchor Books, New York : 2007.

In San Francisco, a conventional woman who has always been fascinated by her hippie sister, retraces the sister's European trip which ended in her death. In the process of learning more about her, the idol loses some of the glitter. A first novel.

Constable & Robinson, New York : 2012.

In Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan's remarkable ability to t.

Abacus, London : 2008.