DARKWAVE: Jennifer Egan at the Booksmith tomorrow

Read This Now

In Jennifer Egan's first novel, Look at Me, it was difficult to identify with 35-year-old Charlotte Swenson, a bitchy, beautiful Manhattan model who’d been disfigured in a car accident, and whose unnerving sense of entitlement was outdone only by her unmendable emotional fractures. That didn’t stop it from being short-listed for the 2001 National Book Award: Egan has a knack for keeping your rapt attention even with the most unlikable of narrators. Danny, the main character of The Keep, is another New York hipster with a bit of an ax to grind. We meet him just as he arrives at a mediæval castle in Eastern Europe, broke and friendless, on the invitation of his psychologically damaged yet supposedly "recovered" cousin. Heavy paranoia and gothic imagery are the obvious hooks, but Egan’s irresistibly modern prose and effortless POV cuts are what will leave you begging for more when she reads tomorrow at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.

BTdubs, we just finished reading The Keep last night. And we're gonna have to go ahead and call it one of our fave new books this year. It's the ultimate recipe for a delicious read: love, mystery, death, hipsters, prisoners in creative writing classes, and European castles. Do not walk, but run, to the bookstore.

ELSEWHERE:
There's a long list of fantastic reviews over at Jennifer Egan dot com
Enjoy your stay at The Keep hotel