{ "item_title" : "The Candy House", "item_author" : [" Jennifer Egan "], "item_description" : "Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Glamour, USA TODAY, Parade, Bustle, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Tampa Bay Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and many more From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a sibling novel to her Pulitzer Prize- and ?NBCC Award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad--an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private. The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis. Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or externalizing memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, Own Your Unconscious--that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others--has seduced multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are counters who track and exploit desires and there are eluders, those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles--from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets. If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music's more disjunctive approach. The parts are titled: Build, Break, Drop. With an emphasis on gaming, portals, and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. Egan takes to stunning new heights her deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture (Vogue). The Candy House delivers an absolutely extraordinary combination of fierce, exhilarating intelligence and heart.Praise for The Candy House by Jennifer Egan“Egan returns to the world of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad in this long-awaited follow-up. Some characters and themes recur — the music executive Bennie Salazar; his mentor, Lou; and his protégé, Sasha; among others — though Egan jumps between the perspectives of their families and loved ones in a complex story about memory, storytelling and how technology encroaches on our lives.” —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times“Sometimes…you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan’s new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start… The Candy House is a trim 334 pages, but it has a dwarf-star density. Inside, 15 or 20 other novels are trying to climb out… This is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century triple-decker novel onto a flash drive… Egan has a zonking sense of control; she knows where she’s going and the polyphonic effects she wants to achieve, and she achieves them, as if she were writing on a type of MacBook that won’t exist for another decade… The Candy House and Goon Squad are touchstone New York City and technology novels of our time; they’ll be printed in one volume someday, I suspect, by the Library of America… Always check for your wallet when a writer goes all in, as Egan does here, on the power of storytelling and of fiction. The Candy House makes that case simply by existing.” —Dwight Garner, The New York TimesHaunting and often hilarious, this is a wondrous, riotously inventive work of speculative fiction that celebrates the power of the imagination in the face of technology that threatens to do our thinking for us ... a top spring title with magnetic pull for Visit from the Goon Squad admirers and fans of smart, literary speculative fiction. —Booklist, STARRED review“An electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor… Egan cleverly echoes the ambitious, savvy marketing schemes of real-world tech barons with Own Your Unconscious… Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. This is Egan’s best yet.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review“Wonderfully kaleidoscopic…meticulously rendered… Most impressive, however, is the prescience—never resorting to cheap technophobia or didactic moralizing—with which Egan manages to ask: What does it cost us to taste the Candy House? ...A forceful, wonderfully fragmented novel of a terrifyingly possible future, as intellectually rigorous as it is formally impressive, and yet another monumental work from Egan.” —Library Journal, STARRED review“Egan really dazzles when she turns her formidable gifts to examining the changes to society and individuals wrought by the internet and social media…A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.” —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review“Even in an era of boundless hype, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House has a legitimate claim on the title of Most Anticipated Book of the Year…[contains] a brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post“A fast-paced polyvoiced romp thru America in the grip of a sinister tech that allows others into your mind. EEK!” —Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments“Egan is a puzzlemaster who conceives of her projects as problems to solve. She is known less for a type of book than her singular intelligence and ambition, which produce works that defy categorization.” —Lauren Mechling, Vogue“Its teeming tapestry of strivers, dropouts, and dreamers as insistently alive as they were 12 years ago… The Candy House, for all its dips and spins and cul-de-sacs, its brain- weevil gadgets and future panics, does what only the best and rarest books can: peel back the thin membrane of ordinary life, and find transcendence on the other side.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly“I’m pretty sure there’s nothing Jennifer Egan can’t do, so a follow-up to her influential Pulitzer Prize–winning 2010 novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad? Hell, yes. Egan being Egan, this is not a traditional sequel, of course—she calls it a “sibling novel”—but it promises to revisit some peripheral characters from the earlier novel and expand upon their stories with a scope and emotional wallop equal to its predecessor.” —Tom Beer, Kirkus[The Candy House] is a novel that resists form, incorporating tweets and emails from the future in a series of interconnected stories that show the promise of endless intersubjectivity and the perils of finding missed connections. As we continue to make sense of the fractured attachments that social media makes possible in our own world, Egan imagines a present and a future that push us to interrogate what such a collective mind-meld will mean. —VultureUsing the inventiveness that made A Visit From the Goon Squad such a delight, Egan delivers another formally creative novel. —Buzzfeed“A complex, compelling read that showcases Egan’s masterful storytelling.” —Time“Another multi-narrator masterpiece about searching for meaning in a crazy world.” —Entertainment Weekly“You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit…complex and intimate.” —Good Housekeeping“Inventive, effervescent… Egan plaits multiple narratives and techniques to underscore the manifold ways our own desires betray us in a brave new coded world.” —Oprah DailyPraise for A Visit From the Goon Squad“It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused.” —Time Magazine“Egan introduces a dizzying array of characters…but it all makes brilliant sense in the end. A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change–and what change and constancy mean in a Facebook–era world where ‘the days of losing touch are almost gone.'” —People Magazine“Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it.” —The New York Times", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/47/671/676/1476716765_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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