I’m working today to finalize a schedule for our summer book club discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. We’ll most likely commence at the start of next week. (I think I said that last week, but I really mean it this time.)
Meanwhile, a few more links for those of you who’re reading or have just read the book. I tracked down a radio interview I remembered hearing around the time Chronic City came out. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff conducted a long phone interview with Lethem for his WFMU show The Media Squat — well worth the listen. Lethem lets loose on the new New York around the 19:50 mark.
And earlier this summer Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish connected the dots between an Etsy.tv clip on a secret Upper East Side bookstore and a New Yorker piece from 2008 which noted that Lethem had spent time as a teenager working for the same eccentric bookmonger. A window onto the kinds of secret knowledge Chronic City seems simultaneously to satirize and celebrate — or perhaps to mourn:
There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.