Talk:A Visit from the Goon Squad

The End of Literacy

This signifies the end. It's like the Titanic winning the Oscar. The Pulitzer means nothing. Holy fuck, a Powerpoint chapter? Original! The author is "a fan of rock music"? Blow me down...punk rockers! How contemporary! Next year, she'll win again with a ship of fools novel about pirates, zombies, and vampires. Shit, "Twilight" should've won...that at least was popular. THIS IS MARKETING. Magmagoblin2 (talk) 23:45, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

See the NPR article by Bastian for a nuanced view of the books importance as a mirror of current culture. However in the bigger picture you may be right, the kind of short attention span multi-tasking mindset the book mirrors may indeed by a backwards step in literacy. Disclaimer: I have not read the novel :) Green Cardamom (talk) 00:35, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with the article per se, but the writing is wretched, and I am forced to agree--a marketing ploy. I made one delete for the sake of intellectual honesty.--Reedmalloy (talk) 05:54, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Issues

A Visit from The Goon Squad has been classified as both a novel and a short story collection by different critics because of its unusual structure.[1]

The source does not say that the structure is "unusual" and in 2011, the structure is not considered or classified as "unusual"; it's all been done before, many times. What the source does say is that that this is not a traditional novel delivered from the POV of one narrator. "Instead we're now experiencing the collision of multiple different worlds from unusual vantage points, much like the film Crash, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005." True, and as you can see from the source, an "unusual vantage point" is not an unusual structure. In fact, as the article makes clear, it is quite common in fiction. Viriditas (talk) 10:39, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

A Visit from The Goon Squad has been classified as both a novel and a short story collection[2]

The source cited does not say that.Viriditas (talk) 10:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Characters who are only mentioned in passing in one story will become central in another. As the book progresses, the reader gradually assembles carefully-arranged details, and comes to understand the origin, conflicts and ultimate fate of each major character.[3]

The source cited does not say that. Viriditas (talk) 10:49, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Etc. If there isn't an error with the source being used here, then the link to the NPR article by Jonathan Bastian is probably supposed to go to his podcast at APR[4] where he spent 50 minutes (over the course of two shows) talking with the author on March 22 and 29th.[5] If that is indeed the case, then the reference needs to be fixed to point to the APR podcasts instead of the NPR opinion page. Viriditas (talk) 10:54, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Your correct, I was trying to source material that someone else wrote, and Bastian's article was related, but I was going from memory and should have looked at it more carefully. Green Cardamom (talk) 14:15, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

A Visit From the Goon Squad

The "From" is capitalized in the title, see http://jenniferegan.com -- many sites (including Amazon) have it lowercase. The authority is the author herself. Green Cardamom (talk) 14:12, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure about that? – Not about her having it spelled "From" on her website (it also says Look At Me there, how do you know any of that is actually intentional?), but about that not being overruled by Wikipedia guidelines. If you are (please name the pertinent WP passages), please correct the changes I made, also at the author's entry (by the way, on both pages, it already sometimes was spelled "from"). – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 11:55, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

There are no Wikipedia guidelines being overruled in fact we are relying on the most reliable sources per WP:V and WP:RS. We should use what the publishing imprint uses along with the best secondary sources. This is reflected by the publisher's website Vintage-Anchor and in the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post which all have a reputation for editorial fact checking. There are of course other sources that use lower case and therein is the debate but most of those other sources don't have the reputation of the NYT, LAT and WaPo. The strongest source for lower case is Random House, which owns Vintage-Anchor, however they are a distributor, Vintage-Anchor is the more authoritative source since they are the actual publisher with editorial control over the book content. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 19:19, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

If you look "inside the book" on amazon.com, the book with all lower-case front cover, you can see that it is consistently "A Visit from the Goon Squad" inside the book, title page and all front matter. Same if you click through to the book page on the publisher site linked above. Probably some of those news sites have a style to capitalize four-letter prepositions? I'm not sure what WP style guidelines say about book titles, but whatever it is, let's just follow it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:53, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Here it is: MOS:CAPS#Composition titles. Lowercase "from". No conflict with the actual book. Just do it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:58, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Ok you convinced me, the book itself is probably the ultimate source, and supported by MoS. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 05:31, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I tried to rename but the old redirect is in the way, I submitted a speedy delete request to free it up so the article can be renamed. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 05:38, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

PowerPoint Presentation or Printout

The novel includes a PowerPoint printout, not a PowerPoint presentation. At a presentation, the presenter is there talking as the slides appear onscreen. The book cannot by definition include a presentation. What is in the book is a PowerPoint printout. (BTW, "Many critics were impressed by Egan's experiments with structure, such as a section formatted like a PowerPoint printout" may be true, but many critics were also aghast by the use of printed slides in a novel). Chisme (talk) 00:02, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

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