Open Culture (Free subscription) | yesterday
Jonathan Lethem, the writer behind Motherless Brooklyn (one of my faves) and Fortress of Solitude, has a new book out, Chronic City. Above, he talks about the surreal quality of his work, the future of digital books, and the personal guidelines that determine what he writes, and won’t write. Within this last point, you will [...]
The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | 12 hours ago
All this week, Miami is celebrating the world of literature with its annual Book Fair. Running from November 8 - 15 and open to the public for a small entrance fee, the fair is already going strong in its 26th year despite a significantly reduced budget , and is celebrating authors big and small. Says the Miami New Times : The afterparties are nil and the fashions are more along the lines of smoking...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 16 hours ago
There's hard-edged drama, double-crossing detectives and violent murder - without any humans. Animal fiction just got dirty When Chips Hardy's Each Day a Small Victory was published in 2007, it garnered some odd reviews: Shooting and Conservation magazine called it "Beatrix Potter meets the Kray Brothers" and Jake Arnott, a man who knows whereof he speaks, described it as "Pulp Fiction...
Silliman's Blog (Free subscription) | yesterday
Photo by David Highsmith A polished apple for David Melnick § Secret © treaty leaks – & it’s bad § Murdoch’s plan : block Google search § What’s going on in Russian poetry ? § Bolaño, Inc . “ Not a rebel ” Bolaño for beginners § My original 1979 talk on The New Sentence , all 3 hours & 4 minutes of it, or divided...
Blogcritics: Books (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Chronic City seems likes a typical buddy novel set in New York, until the robots and space weapons show up. Chronic City - New York - Jonathan Lethem - United States - Jonathan Lethem Chronic City
Ward Six (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
This seems to be the year in which my favorite writers publish novels that don't make any sense . I'm talking about the new Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City , an exhaustingly unmoored narrative about weird male friendship, set in an alternate-universe Upper East Side. There's lots to like here, especially if, like me, you like Lethem--an escaped tiger wreaking havoc, giant urban conceptual-art pits in...
PBS (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
In Jonathan Lethem's new novel, "Chronic City," two friends travel through a Manhattan that is both very recognizable -- from the billionaire mayor to the burgers at a local diner -- while also surreal, looking for truth.
Boswell and Books (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Here are our latest hardcover fiction bestsellers: 1. The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan 2. Last Night in Twisted River, by John Irving 3. Wild Things (fur-covered version), by Dave Eggers 4. Half-Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls 5. A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore 6. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown 7. The Help, by Katherine Stockett 8. Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem 9. Her Fearful Symmetry,...
Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
At the just opened Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Thursday night at 7:30 PM is your chance to hear Jonathan read 1/8th of Chronic City, a surreal and witty epic set in a Manhattan almost like our own. "The oddball cultural savant Perkus Tooth is an unforgettable character, and the journey our hapless narrator takes through Perkus' world of stranded astronauts, dog hotels, giant tigers, and...
SF Signal (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Interviews/Profiles The Guardian profiles Margo Lanagan . The Agony Column has a recording of the SF in SF Panel Discussion Featuring Eric Simons, Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson on October 17, 2009 (podcast). TV Guide has 5 Questions with V's Scott Wolf . New York Post profiles Jonathan Lethem . Blog Critics interviews John Brown . (via Tor Books ) Genreville interviews Anton Strout . John...
New York Post (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Job Much-lauded author of novels including “Motherless Brooklyn,” as well as short stories, nonfiction and comics. Lethem, a winner of the 2005 MacArthur “genius” award, toils in a communal artists’ workspace by the Gowanus Canal, a few blocks from w...
New York Post (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Job Much-lauded author of novels including “Motherless Brooklyn,” as well as short stories, nonfiction and comics. Lethem, a winner of the 2005 MacArthur “genius” award, toils in a communal artists’ workspace by the Gowanus Canal, a few blocks from w...
Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot (Free subscription) | 11/01/2009
Book lovers, get ready to celebrate because the 26th edition of the nation’s finest and largest literary gathering, Miami Book Fair International (Fair), is just around the corner. Presented by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College (MDC), the Fair will take place Nov. 8 – 15 at the college’s Wolfson Campus, 300 N.E. Second Ave., in downtown Miami. The Fair...
Thumb drives and oven clocks (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Hey gang. My review of Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is up at Identity Theory. It starts like this. There was recently an interesting discussion at The Quarterly Conversation about what constitutes good literary criticism. J.C. Hallmann suggests that his fellow critics ought to approach literature not in the way critics do, but in the way writers do, in that writers are “perfectly comfortable...
Bluestalking Reader (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
"5 UNDER 35" THE NEXT GENERATION OF FICTION WRITERS CELEBRATION KICKS OFF NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS WEEK IN DUMBO, BROOKLYN Hosted by Punk Rock Icon and Novelist Richard Hell, Novelist and MacArthur Fellow Jonathan Lethem to DJ New York, New York...
Videos