Jonathan Lethem has been chronicling the paradoxes of city life for more than three decades, and this week he brings that restless, genre-bending mind to Kingston. On Friday, October 10 at 7pm, Lethem will appear at the O+ Festival in Kingston, on the Chronogram Stage at the Old Dutch Church in conversation with author Ayana Mathis. Expect a lively evening of literary archeology and urban phantasmagoria from a writer whose books are equal parts investigation and collage.
Gentrification’s “Ur-Story”
If Lethem has a fixation, it’s the slow, paradoxical churn of neighborhoods. The Fortress of Solitude (2003) mined his own adolescence on Dean Street in Boerum Hill for a magic-realist coming-of-age story about race, art, and the fragile bonds of boyhood. Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023) returns to the same block 20 years later in a wholly different form: no superheroes this time, just a chorus of voices recounting muggings, hustles, and the unspoken rules of survival as the neighborhood shifts around them.
“My family bought in what’s now called Boerum Hill in 1967,” he recalls. “I had a front-row seat. In some ways, I think it’s the ur-gentrification, the template. But back then it didn’t have a name. The word ‘gentrification’ didn’t circulate until the late ’80s. It was called ‘urban pioneering,’ or ‘reclamation.’” That slow-motion story, Lethem says, was “happening everywhere around me and I had a helpless fixation on the paradoxes of it as I experienced them then.”
If Fortress was his superhero mural of that era, Brooklyn Crime Novel is the oral history. Written largely during the pandemic lockdown, it draws on interviews with former neighbors and classmates conducted over Zoom. “People had nothing else to do,” he says. “And like myself, they’d been thrown into themselves and into the quandary of middle age—Who was I? Who might I still be? Where did I come from? Talking about the old neighborhood became this group project.” The result is a polyphonic portrait of a time and place, written in a collective voice. “I believe in that book as a novel,” Lethem says. “But it’s also secretly a kind of essay film, an oral-historical compendium.”
The Third Book “Slow-Cooking”
Lethem has begun sketching what he calls a third book in the “Dean Street” cycle. “Brooklyn Crime Novel is as different as can be from Fortress of Solitude, but it’s unmistakably a reworking of the same base materials,” he says. “At a 20-year distance, I had a lot more to say about it. But just because I wrote a book in 2003 doesn’t mean the story froze. More money has flooded onto the site of my fixation since I wrote Fortress than in the years before.”
The next book, he says, will be less about the mechanics of gentrification and more about those who fled. “It’s about aspects of the human experience—those who ran away from it, who turned their back, who couldn’t solve it, who didn’t want to be identified with it. They have a somatic imprint of having grown up where I did, but they’re trying not to admit it to themselves.” It’s still in the “very, very slow cooking” phase.
Chaos and Control
Lethem is famously a magpie. He has written detective novels (Gun, with Occasional Music), sci-fi allegories (Amnesia Moon), comics scripts, a book-long analysis of the Talking Heads’ third album (Fear of Music), and now two very different Brooklyn sagas. His secret, he says, is not obedience to genre but curiosity about its “weird edges.”
“I’m not hostile to the genres I involve myself in,” he explains. “I really love them. I just like their weird edges where they sort of fry and sizzle and turn into other things. I like prying up unexpected spaces in their structures and flooding that with something else.”
Motherless Brooklyn (1999), with its inimitable narrator Lionel Essrog, was his first major success, and also his first full-throttle experiment in linguistic chaos. “One of the primary things that Motherless Brooklyn was doing for me was giving me a place to do a kind of linguistic wordplay,” he says. “My first four novels had side characters who could riff, but I found it distracting. Motherless Brooklyn was an experiment: What if I put it at the center of the book? What if I made it the main character and the narrator who had this propensity—what would that do?”
Once he had invited linguistic chaos, he looked for the most rigid form to pour it into. “I grew up watching ‘Get Smart,’” he says with a laugh. “The basic opposition was chaos versus control. So what is the most hide-bound, rigorous format I could pour this chaos into? The detective novel, which I loved already. That would give me an exoskeleton. It would walk around and then the crazy language would have a structural embodiment.”
NFTs, Chaldrons, and Prediction
Lethem’s 2009 novel Chronic City featured a running joke about “chaldrons”—mysterious, beautiful objects everyone wants to buy online but no one can actually acquire. When NFTs arrived a decade later, some readers (including me) thought immediately of chaldrons. Lethem laughs. “I accidentally predicted NFTs. It’s my one absolutely apt and comprehensive science fiction prediction. But that’s like being a stopped clock that’s right once a day.”
Unlike the extrapolating futurists he admires—Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson—Lethem says he is more interested in “the atmosphere of extrapolated writing” than in rigorous prediction. “I like the vibe that comes from writing about possible future uses of everything—technology, culture. I fool around with it.”
The Autodidact’s Shelf
His hybrid style began, he says, with reading habits that refused to stay in one lane. “It could be Chandler, it could be Philip K. Dick—those were the first things I was pulling off shelves. Kafka, Patricia Highsmith, Ray Bradbury, Graham Greene—that lit up the circuitry for me.” Sometimes he would grind through dozens of work-a-day genre writers before finding the “magic” again; sometimes he would discover an international analog—Julio Cortázar, Kobo Abe, Italo Calvino. “I started to think every language has one writer for me,” he says. “Then you start to realize they’re reading each other.”
Nonfiction as Fiction
Although he’s published celebrated essays and criticism, Lethem still considers himself fundamentally a fiction writer. “I wrote multiple novels and dozens and dozens of short stories before I ever really tried nonfiction,” he says. “By the time I did, my methods as a fiction writer were so developed—I was like a fiddler crab with one giant claw.” The first essays he wrote, he says, he thought of as short stories: “The only way I can imagine writing an essayistic piece or a review is to make up a character named Jonathan who’s going to talk to you for a little while about a given thing.”
Even his music criticism (Fear of Music, Cellophane Bricks) is, in his mind, “stories about characters living alongside artworks.” To Lethem, his nonfiction is “Frank Zappa making a jazz record—it’s still Frank Zappa. I’m still a fiction writer.”
Jonathan Lethem: New and Collected Short Stories
Alongside his Brooklyn sagas, Lethem recently published A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Short Stories (Ecco, 2025), a hefty volume gathering three decades of fiction. From early experiments that splice detective grit with sci-fi weirdness to more recent pieces of domestic surrealism, the collection reveals a writer forever testing the limits of form.
“Short stories capture a writer at their most experimental,” Lethem says. “They show all the places I’ve tried things out—some of which became novels, some of which stayed small and strange.”
The book offers a map of Lethem’s obsessions—Brooklyn, music, memory, and the blurred line between pulp and literary fiction—condensed into high-voltage bursts.
