An interview with Jonathan Lethem

Jared Bland (Canada/USA) is the managing editor of the Walrus and sits on the board of directors of PEN Canada.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of eight previous novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of four short story collections, a collection of autobiographical essays, a novella and a comic book. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, McSweeny's, Tin House, the New York Times and others. Lethem presents his new novel, Chronic City, a gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of A Week of This: A Novel in Seven Days and is the Books for Young People Editor for Quill & Quire magazine. His writing and reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, Fashion, and elsewhere.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station.

Into Chase's cloistered city 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. Together Chase and Perkus 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.