“I feel like he was a mascot for a while, and he didn’t really want to be a mascot.” says Boris Kachka, who writes about books for New York Magazine. Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart, Paul Auster and Rick Moody all live in Brooklyn, and there was an unfortunate cluster of writers named Jonathan (among them Lethem, Safran Foer and Ames). “Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists, it’s cancerous with novelists,” Lethem says. Simultaneously, Brooklyn became a literary hot spot. “That environment was, for me, like constant nostalgic LSD,” he says. In Brooklyn, Lethem lived on the same street where he was raised. The move surprised many, in part because Lethem, a MacArthur “genius” Fellow, has made New York and its landscapes the center of his work - “Chronic City” (2009), “Fortress of Solitude” (2003) and 1999’s “Motherless Brooklyn,” the last of which Lethem calls “an all-out Valentine” to New York, the city where he grew up.
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