The latest in a series of occasional posts on authors who praise each other’s books.
Jonathan Lethem on Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book:
“Conversational, embracing, and casually erudite, Laura Miller’s superb long essay is the kind that comes along too rarely, a foray into the garden of one book that opens to the whole world of reading, becoming in the process a subtle reader’s memoir, and manifesto.”
“A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem’s near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) … On this you can count: Chronic City is the real thing.”
Lethem also appeared in the “Backscratching in Our Time” on Oct. 30, 2009. The series was inspired by “Logrolling in Our Time” in the late Spy magazine. You can nominate authors for it by using the e-mail address on the “Contact” page on this site.
Leave a Reply