Chronic_City_Lethem
2011 Longlist

Chronic City

artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives of residuals earned as a child star on a much beloved sitcom, Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: trapped on the International Space Station by a layer of low-orbit mines, Chase’s teenage sweetheart and fiancée Janice Trumbull sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she is in earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper Eastside dinner parties.

Into Chase’s cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed-free-range pop –critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life shattering urgency.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Jonathan
Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others. He lives in California.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others. He lives in California.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
United States
Original Language
English
Publisher
Faber & Faber

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