Jennifer Egan (born September 6, 1962 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Brooklyn. She was raised in San Francisco. After she graduated from Lowell High School, Egan attended the University of Pennsylvania and St John's College, Cambridge.
She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope All-Story, and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.
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.
Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist; she deploys most of the arsenal developed by the metafiction writers of the 1960’s and refined by more recent authors like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace ... but she can’t exactly be counted as one of them. The opening of her novel, “The Keep,” lays out a whole Escherian architecture, replete with metafictional trapdoors, pitfalls, infinitely receding reflections and trompe l’oeil effects, but what’s more immediately striking about this book is its unusually vivid and convincing realism.