Jennifer Egan Wins a Pulitzer

It’s been quite a year for Jennifer Egan.

Her best-selling novel A Visit from The Goon Squad has been picking up accolades left and right. It was named a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award and the LA Times Book Prize. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award last month. And yesterday, it was named the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — the committee called it “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.”

The book follows a group of music industry types — sleazeball executives, aging rock stars, kleptomanical assistants — jumping forward, backward and sideways in time. It’s poignant, surprising, and innovative (one chapter, narrated by a child, is written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation).

When she talked with Kurt Andersen, shortly after the book came out, Egan explained that she didn’t set out to write a novel at all. Instead, it was a writing exercise she expected to turn into something completely different.