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Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem: Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Jonathan Lethem

    Jonathan Lethem's books include the novels Chronic City and You Don't Love Me Yet and the essay collection The Disappointment Artist.  A past MacArthur Fellow, his stories and essays have appeared in such publications asThe New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. Profile
  • ABOUT Victoria Lautman

    Victoria Lautman is the founder, host, and executive-producer of Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman. Prior to conceiving and founding this free, public series, Victoria was a featured host and contributor on Chicago Public Radio for two decades. Profile
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I think art is not to be useful. It’s to be interesting or stirring or funny, confusing or any number of other things.       

Click play to listen. Recorded on November 8, 2009.

Jonathan Lethem has said his novel Chronic City (2009) is about "a circle of friends that includes a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghostwriter of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange." Journalist Victoria Lautman and Lethem consider those characters to be "like the stoner Knights of the Round Table in search of a chaldron, like the cast of Seinfeld run through Darth Vader training camp." She and Lethem tease out motifs of slippery near-truths and pop-culture supertasters in a beyond-believable Manhattan.

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