Why people recommend it
The Keep by Jennifer Egan is a gothic thriller novel that unfolds inside an unusual prison setting and an unreal realm. On The Book Review episode '21st Century Books Special Edition: Jennifer Egan on A Visit from the Goon Squad', guest Jennifer Egan reflected on her bibliography, mentioning that writing her gothic thriller taught her valuable lessons about crafting unconventional stories. Additionally, in an episode titled 'Jennifer Egan Talks About Manhattan Beach', the author elaborated on her writing process, emphasizing that live interviews are essential to her fiction. She noted that while conducting research and writing concurrently for her gothic thriller and A Visit from the Goon Squad, the experience of building a world that does not exist in reality ultimately helped inform her later projects. Egan pointed to the prison-set narrative as a prime example of how her research and world-building efforts functioned across different works of fiction during her career as a novelist.
Who recommended it
- Jennifer Egan Discussed
Jennifer Egan — 3 mentions
“but when as I worked on books after that I would think hm you know I wrote a Gothic novel a Gothic Thriller called the keep”
“interviews with live people are just essential and they have been all the way through with my fiction you know for example with the keep which is a lot of it takes place in a prison”
“so all I was doing was research amidst writing the keep and writing a visit from the Goon Squad you know in a way the experience of writing the keep helped me with this because that is a Gothic Thriller that takes place in a in a realm that doesn't exist in the real world”
Also mentioned in the same episodes
- A Visit from the Goon Squad
- In Search of Lost Time
- Light years
- Manhattan Beach
- Move fast and break things
- My life as a Russian novel
Other mentions (1: passing, ad reads, own books)
“I was promoting the keep at the book fair but I was researching this book with elderly ladies who were were all too eager to talk to me”