I'm Gilbert Cruz editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review

Podcast Special Edition.

This summer, in addition to our regular episodes, we have a series of interviews with authors

whose books made our list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

Today I'm joined by Jennifer Egan, who released a visit from the Goon Squad in summer 2010, 14 years ago.

In 2022, she put out a follow-up to that book, The Candy House.

Both share the same structure, a series of events. follow-up to that book, The Candy House.

Both share the same structure, a series of stories

whose protagonists are interconnected, rising and falling

in importance as the book hops back and forth in time.

Jennifer Egan, Jenny, welcome back to the Book Review podcast.

Thank you so much, happy to be here.

What are your memories from when you actually released the book as you think back to summer 2010?

Well, you know, it had a sort of slow start and actually pretty low expectations around it, I would say say including my own.

We released it. I did I went on a book tour but it was not selling well at all.

It was tanking actually.

And there was a lot of hand-winging about what was going wrong and I think one of the biggest problems in retrospect was because I felt like it may it might not satisfy people's expectations of what a novel should be

and then they might not like it and the publisher didn't want to call it a story collection

because apparently they tend not to sell as well. So we called it nothing.

That was the marketing error.

Road to success. It just said a visit from the goon squad, a kind of idiosyncratic title, which also came under scrutiny when things started to go wrong,

with no designation in terms of genre and then my name and a picture of a guitar part of a guitar and

...