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Chronic City

Chronic City

by JonathanLethem (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2009

    $3.31

  • Used

    Hardcover 2009

    $3.31
Synopsis

Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, living off his earnings as a child star. Chase owes his current social status to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancee, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, and trapped in a vague routine punctuated only by Upper Eastside dinner parties and engagements. Into Chase's life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus' 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. Together Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth - that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought. Beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, Lethem's new novel is as always, utterly unique.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 480
 Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 24 Dec 2009
ISBN 10: 0571235662
ISBN 13: 9780571235667
Book Overview: Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem - the critically-acclaimed author of You Don't Love Me Yet and Fortress of Solitude - is a searing portrayal of Manhattan-ites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies.

Media Reviews

Astonishing....Knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.....Turbocharged....Intricate and seamless....A dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it's also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. -- New York Times Book Review
Chronic City is a feverish portrait of the anxiety and isolation of modern Manhattan, full of dark humor and dazzling writing....proves both funny and frightening. -- Entertainment Weekly

Exuberant literary revving.....Lethem's vision of New York can approach the Swiftian. It is impressively observant in its detail and scourging in its mocking satire. There are any number of wicked portraits....His comments on New York life are often achingly exact....So pungent and imaginative -- The Boston Globe
Ingenious and unsettling...Lethem pulls everything together in a stunning critique of our perceptions of reality and our preco

Author Bio
Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and is the author of 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.