Chronic city - Jonathan Lethem

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 fiance, 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.

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels includingFortress of SolitudeandMotherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year byEsquireand won the National Book Critics Circle Award and theSalonBook 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, editedThe Vintage Book of