This morning, Books@Torontoist editor Erin Balser sat down with Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Lethem. The author of the bestselling The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn discussed his most recent project, Chronic City , a largely plotless tale of two men navigating an alternate Manhattan—one where The New York Times publishes a war-free issue, the city smells of chocolate, it snows...
Photo: "Discovery Walk" by Luke T. , member of the blogTO Flickr Pool . Events on Toronto's Radar for WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 25, 2009... lovingly handpicked from blogTO's events calendar . MUSIC | Malajube live at Sonic Boom Polaris Prize finalists Malajube come to Toronto's biggest independent record store for an up-close-and-personal performance tonight. The Montreal francophone foursome launched...
For the past couple of years I have been commenting on each piece of fiction appearing in The New Yorker, and I've also been naming at Story of the Year with the help of my readers. The winner of the New Yorker Story of the Year for 2008 was the terrific "Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris. And now it is time to turn our attention to this year's stories. Please leave a comment here, or send me...
In the age of neuro-everything, I am hardly surprised to hear about the neuronovel . Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex reports, The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel-the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind-has transformed...
Marrie Stone interviews Jonathan Lethem , author of Chronic City , and Elizabeth Benedict , author of Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives . Download audio . (Broadcast date: Nov 18, 2009)
Of all the strange characters and figures who drift through Jonathan Lethem's new novel Chronic City – which include an obsessive motormouth of an ex-rock critic, a giant tiger, a soul-redeeming pit bull, Marlon Brando and a cloud that hangs permanently over the place where the World Trade Center might have been – the strangest is New York City itself.
A few years ago, Jonathan Lethem published an essay in The Village Voice, ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, in which he decried the close-mindedness of the genre and sketched an alternate history in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the Nebula instead of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama in 1973, leading to a reconciliation...
“What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when was fifteen and reading Howard Zinn and Charles Bukowski and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description and [...]
Over at Jeff Vandermeer's blog , authors Dan Abnett and Mark Charan Newton discuss the challenges of writing tie-ins vs non-franchise fiction. Here's an excerpt: Mark Charan Newton : You see it frequently these days – a literary fiction star such as Jonathan Lethem wanting to write a comic strip for Omega the Unknown, or Jodi Piccoult writing a Wonder Woman series. There’s a sense of reverence...
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I’m reading Jonathan’s Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City. The first chapter is a quirky, compelling read, focused on the burgeoning friendship of two very different men in a Manhattan that creeps into every bit of characterization. And while I love a good opening, there’s a ton to admire in the way Lethem broadside of The [...]