Recommendations

Books Like A Visit from the Goon Squad

Best books to read after A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the music industry — time, aging, formal inventiveness. These recommendations continue the Egan canon, explore the formally inventive American novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the interconnected story-cycle novel.

  1. The Candy House cover
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    The Candy House

    by Jennifer Egan

    The companion Egan novel — overlapping characters from Goon Squad in a near-future of shareable memories, formally inventive again and working as a standalone or a continuation.

    Buy on Amazon
  2. Look at Me cover
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    Look at Me

    by Jennifer Egan

    The earlier Egan novel — Charlotte Swenson in New York City and the culture of image and identity, showing the same formal interests and thematic concerns that Goon Squad develops more fully.

    Buy on Amazon
  3. Tenth of December cover
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    Tenth of December

    by George Saunders

    The formal inventiveness companion — Saunders's story collection occupying the same space in contemporary American fiction as Goon Squad, both formally innovative and deeply engaged with what American culture is doing to ordinary people.

    Buy on Amazon
  4. The Corrections cover
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    The Corrections

    by Jonathan Franzen

    The Pulitzer Prize companion — the Lambert family and American domestic life, Franzen's multi-strand family novel sharing Goon Squad's concern with time, aging, and the damage that ambition and failure do to people.

    Buy on Amazon
  5. Columbine cover
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    Columbine

    by Dave Cullen

    For readers who engaged with Goon Squad as a meditation on time and violence — Cullen's definitive account of the Columbine massacre as the nonfiction equivalent of Goon Squad's concern with the random violence that can destroy the arc of a life.

    Buy on Amazon
  6. High Fidelity cover
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    High Fidelity

    by Nick Hornby

    The music industry British fiction companion — Rob Fleming in a North London record shop, the British equivalent of Goon Squad's meditation on what music means to the people who gave their lives to it.

    Buy on Amazon
  7. White Noise cover
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    White Noise

    by Don DeLillo

    The American postmodern companion — Jack Gladney and the airborne toxic event, DeLillo examining American consumer culture with the same formal self-consciousness that Egan brings to the music industry in Goon Squad.

    Buy on Amazon
  8. Cloud Atlas cover
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    Cloud Atlas

    by David Mitchell

    The interconnected story-cycle companion — six nested stories across five centuries, Mitchell's formally inventive structure sharing Goon Squad's commitment to showing how individual lives connect across time.

    Buy on Amazon

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