Events at the Shop
Chronic City - Jonathan Lethem in conversation with Tom McCarthy
Thursday 7 January 2010
Chronic City is a searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies. Into the cloistered life of Chase Insteadman, handsome but inoffensive fixture on the social scene, comes Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw them into another Manhattan, as they attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: truth. Lethem, the author of seven novels, including Fortress of Solitude, was in conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy.
Introduction
Listen now (11:49) | Download (MP3, 10.8MB)
In Conversation
Listen now (31:15) | Download (MP3, 28.6MB)
Audience Questions
Listen now (11:49) | Download (MP3, 15.6MB)
Recorded and edited by Adrian Leibowitz and Brett Wilson
Common Custom:documentary & archive
Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year’s Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Tom McCarthy is known for the reports, manifestos and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. His nonfiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature was published by Granta Books in 2006. He is the author of the novels Remainder and Men in Space.
Further Reading
If you enjoyed this event, you may also be interested in:
Alan Bennett - The Habit of Art