Emerald City

By: Jennifer Egan

Narrated by: Charlie Thurston, Madeleine Lambert, Richard Waterhouse

These 11 masterful stories - the first collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters - models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls - are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations.

Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City - a teen’s discovery of his father’s secret life, a financial trader who runs into the con man who swindled him - are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

©1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 Jennifer Egan; 2012 AudioGO

Interesting read...

Well this is my first taste of Egan. I found the work well written and authentic. More on Goodreads.

As the New York woman book

Critic says, we live in Jennifer Egan’s world now, esp since The Candy House came out. See her genius here too!

Awful narrator

I enjoyed the stories but the female narrator was, well, awful. Her voice was very flat; no inflection.

better than many novels

short stories are good balance of character development, plot line, and "meaning" - not too much navel gazing or psycho babble.

Didn’t like it

I didn’t like the distracting weird voices the female narrator used for different characters (like one male character who inexplicably always had a stuffed up nose) and I didn’t like the emptiness of the stories themselves. The characters were often not relatable to me personally and I found it hard to get invested or interested in their situations. I got bored with the fact that a lot of the stories involved models and modeling

I did like it when I was able to get pulled in, which happened a few times.