Interview

Jonathan Lethem

Author Interview Jonathan Lethem 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 creator, host, and producer of the radio program Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman, on the air since 2004. She was a featured interviewer, host, and contributor on Chicago Public Radio for twenty years. She has also appeared as a regular cultural correspondent for WTTW's Artbeat and on several other local television affiliates. Lautman is a contributing editor for Chicago Magazine and a blogger for the Huffington Post. 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.       

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." In this interview with the novelist, Victoria Lautman, host and producer of WFMT’s Writers on the Record, considers 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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Lecture

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Jayne Anne Phillips and Nick Reding 2009 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize

Jayne Anne Phillips and Nick Reding accept the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for their books Lark and Termite and Methland.

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