Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
Jennifer Egan, contributing to our running archive of advice on writing.
Jennifer Egan
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Jennifer Egan’s favorite books, including Jane Austen’s Emma, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
My goal as a writer is to do as much as possible at one time. Life itself is so cacophonous and complex. It’s not that I want to create a cacophony, but I want to do justice to the complexity around us. I don’t want to oversimplify it. I want to take one thing and build from that, and then keep building, until I begin to approximate the complexity of the world and our perceptions of it.
