Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Talks Writing @Google

Ear­li­er this month Jen­nifer Egan, the new­ly-mint­ed Pulitzer Prize win­ner, paid a vis­it to Google to talk about A Vis­it from the Goon Squad, her exper­i­men­tal nov­el that won the Pulitzer, among many oth­er awards. That’s the osten­si­ble focus. But the con­ver­sa­tion moves quick­ly into oth­er areas that will inter­est writ­ers and read­ers alike — how Egan first devel­ops ideas for her nov­els, why she writes her first drafts in illeg­i­ble hand­writ­ing on legal pads, why she wrote a chap­ter of her new nov­el in Pow­er­Point (with­out ever hav­ing used the soft­ware before), what her nov­el has in com­mon with The Who’s Quadrophe­nia (I’m hooked), and how tech­nol­o­gy might change the nov­el as we know it.

The Egan video went live yes­ter­day, and runs about 54 min­utes. Oth­er videos appear­ing in the Authors@Google series fea­ture con­ver­sa­tions with Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, Michael Pol­lan, Slavoj Zizek and Junot Diaz. H/T @webacion