Jennifer Egan - Look at Me

Acclaim for Jennifer Egans LOOK AT ME Ambitious, swiftly paced. Egan writes with such shimmering lan that its easy to follow her cast on its journey. The Wall Street Journal Look at Me is so engrossing, energetic, sharp, and funny, it reminded me of Ralph Ellisons masterpiece, Invisible Man , another novel that charts the modernist riddle of human identity. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air (NPR) Intriguing. An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary. The novels uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency. Time Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times. [She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness. The Washington Post Book World Look at Me is a complicated novel but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers. Los Angeles Times Prescient and provocative. The characters jump from the pages and dare you to care about them. The prose is crisp and precise. The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click. The Philadelphia Inquirer Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand. Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth. Salon.com Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process. Chicago Tribune Egans rich new novel is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images. The Nation Stunning. This is more than a story, its a thought-world, a novel of ideas brilliantly cloaked in the skin of characters. The Sunday Oregonian Egans take is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true. Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving. The Hartford Courant Breathtaking. Combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives. Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come. BookPage An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too. People Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] masterfully entwines the novels secondary characters, building to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and making an incisive statement about our societys obsession with fame and glamour. San Francisco Chronicle Riveting. As the book gains momentum, Egans writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire. A remarkable study of our culture and of our palpable need to be known. O, The Oprah Magazine Egan has created a compelling world. With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines churning waters with admirable skill. Seattle Weekly [A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. Egan animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story. Newsday Dark, hugely ambitious. As riveting as a roadside wreckand noxiously, scathingly funny. Elle Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egans eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers. Us Weekly Fresh, accurate, clear and inventive. The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and behind the consciousness a writer who knows what shes doing. Francine Prose, The New York Observer This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptiveif not clairvoyantwriter whose disturbing vision rings all too true. SF Weekly Egans ability to move with ease between sincerity and satire sets Look at Me apart. Her authentic-feeling details give a sense of unusual immediacy. Vogue

Also by Jennifer Egan Emerald City The Invisible Circus

Jennifer Egan
LOOK AT ME Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Harpers, GQ, Zoetrope , and Ploughshares , and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. Egan lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. For further information about Jennifer Egan, visit her Web site at www.jenniferegan.com.

We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. ULYSSES , JAMES JOYCE

Part One
Double Life