Industry & Advocacy News
December 9, 2011
Book lovers can join a conversation between two of contemporary fiction’s most original and exciting novelists when Jennifer Egan interviews Jeffrey Eugenides at 9 p.m., Monday, Dec. 12 during a national, live call-in event sponsored by Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ. Readers can sign up for the call and order a personally inscribed copy of Eugenides’ latest book, The Marriage Plot, at booktalknation.com.
Greeted as a major new voice in American literature with the release of his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides sparked even greater enthusiasm with his second book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. The sweeping intergenerational story of a Greek American family, narrated by a hermaphrodite named Cal, has sold millions.
The Marriage Plot—called “wry, engaging and beautifully constructed” in the New York Times Book Review and “relentlessly charming, smart and funny,” in USA Today—takes readers to Brown University in the 1980s, focusing on three college seniors on the cusp of that disorienting transition from student to adult.
Egan and Eugenides have been friends since the early 1990s, when they both worked at the Paris Review. Egan’s bestselling, strikingly imaginative fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Eugenides is a professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Labyrinth Books is an independent bookstore and official course book provider for the university.
Booktalk Nation is a new series of phone-in author interviews sponsored by the Authors Guild, which seeks to support independent booksellers and highlight the key role they play in promoting a vibrant literary culture.
Each talk in the series is hosted by a bookstore with ties to the featured author. The Guild is previewing the service this month and will formally launch it in January.
