PRAISE AND REVIEWS

"The novel functions much like Manhattan used to – a mad scramble of connections made and, more often, missed…make(s) a reader ache for a city long gone."
— Esquire 

"Poly-genre-loving fanboy Jonathan Lethem blasts readers into the fantastic realm of Chronic City."
— Vanity Fair 

“The Fortress of Solitude was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. Chronic City is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth."
— The New York Times (link)

"A sprawling book about pop culture and outer space…realistic and fantastic, serious and funny, warm and clear eyed. One of the new generation’s most ambitious writers, Lethem again offers a novel that deals with nothing less important than the difference between truth and lies. And some stories about good cheeseburgers."
— The Daily Beast 

"A stellar, multi-layered novel."
— GQ 

"Funny and mystifying, eminently quotable, resolutely difficult, even heartbreaking, "Chronic City" demonstrates an imaginative breadth not quite of this world."
— Cleveland Plain Dealer 

"Lethem has often sought to interweave the realistic and the fantastic; in Chronic City the result is nearly seamless."
— New York Magazine

"One of America’s finest novelists explores the disconnections among art, government, space travel and parallel realities, as his characters hunger for elusive meaning. Long associated with the borough of Brooklyn, Lethem (You Don’t Love Me Yet, 2007, etc.) shifts to Manhattan in the indeterminate near future, ringing changes on the speculative science fiction that first earned him a cult following...

All truths and realities are open to interpretation, even negotiation, in this brilliantly rich novel. Chase is the hero Manhattan deserves, we see, when Tooth describes his friend as “the ultimate fake. A cog in the city’s fiction.” Lethem’s most ambitious work to date, and his best since Motherless Brooklyn."
— Kirkus

"...a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, (Chronic City) sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset."
— Arthur Nersesian, Publisher's Weekly

"Thick with paranoia, pot smoke, and pop culture references (both real and made-up), Chronic City is a feverish portrait of the anxiety and isolation of modern Manhattan, full of dark humor and dazzling writing. A– "
— Rob Brunner, Entertaiment Weekly

"Lethem has often sought to interweave the realistic and the fantastic; in Chronic City the result is nearly seamless."
— NY Magazine (link)