A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) is a work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. It won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is being adapted by HBO into a television series.

Most of the stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad concern Bennie Salazar, an aging rock music executive, his one-time assistant, Sasha, and their various friends and associates. The book follows a large cast of mostly self-destructive characters as they grow older and fate sends them in directions they did not intend to go. The stories shift back and forth in time, moving from the late sixties to the present day and into the near future. Many of the stories take place in or around New York City, although some are set in California, Italy and Africa.

Because of its unusual narrative structure, some critics have characterized the book as a novel, while others have described it as a collection of linked short stories. A Visit From the Goon Squad is composed of 13 chapters, most of which can be read as individual stories, and it does not focus on any single central character or narrative arc. In addition, many of the chapters in the book were originally published individually as short stories in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper's. However, all of the stories share a set of common characters and repeating themes. In an interview with Salon.com's Laura Miller, Egan stated that she leaned towards describing the book as a novel rather than a short story collection.

A goon squad is a group of thugs or mercenaries, commonly associated with anti-union or pro-union violence. In the case of pro-union violence, a goon squad may be formed by union leaders to intimidate or assault non-union workers, strikebreakers, or parties who do not cooperate with the directives of union leadership. In the case of anti-union violence, goon squads are traditionally hired by employers as an attempt at union busting, and resort to many of the same tactics, including intimidation, espionage, and assault.

During the labor unrest of the late 19th century in the United States, businessmen hired Pinkerton agent goon squads to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

Jennifer Egan (born September 6, 1962) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Egan's novel A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

She was raised in San Francisco. After she graduated from Lowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She has published one short story collection and four novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.

Egan has been hesitant to classify A Visit from the Goon Squad as either a novel or a short story collection. Speaking about A Visit from the Goon Squad's genre, Egan said, "I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!" The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. When discussing her inspiration and approach to the work, she said, "I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist…One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose."