Jennifer Egan, NBCC award winner

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Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday. I was in New York at the ceremony, and wrote about it for The Times.

When the story went online, it was accompanied by a photograph not of Egan but of one of the fiction finalists -- Jonathan Franzen, whose novel ‘Freedom’ had also been up for the award. So were ‘Comedy in a Minor Key’ by Hans Keilson, ‘To the End of the Land’ by David Grossman and ‘Skippy Dies’ by Paul Murray.

Comments left on the online version of the article -- not to mention a flurry of tweets -- were critical of the photographic choice. Today, Deirdre Edgar reveals on The Times’ Readers’ Representative blog what went into making the decision to use the Franzen photograph that was originally found online -- and why it was swapped out for the one of Egan and the cover of her book that you see above.

And if you haven’t picked up Egan’s book yet, I can say wholeheartedly that I think it’s a terrific read -- as I tried to write in my review ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad,’ which ran in our pages in June 2010.

-- Carolyn Kellogg