Black Clock

To his fans, Jonathan Lethem is one who always pushes into new avenues of form and genre, of kidnapping kangaroos and scouring the Zendo for a killer, and he is certainly synonymous with New York. With novels like Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude that have so deeply imbibed into their pages the grit of New York City, it is impossible to separate the two. Chronic City, Lethem’s latest novel, returns to New York once more, but this spring he is set to do the unthinkable. Brooklyn will be sure to bemoan turning Lethemless in 2011 when he trades in New York for Los Angeles as …

It’s undeniable that music influences our sensory experience of the world–especially when we are in the position of the receiver of information. This is to say, it doesn’t take a professional film critic to know that the score or soundtrack is just about as important as what is being visually presented on the screen. What is thought about less often, perhaps, is music’s tie to the reading experience. To be sure, there is a great contingent of readers who prefer not to allow music to mingle with their experience of a text. However, a well-picked (or coincidentally synced) music selection can enhance our …