New York Stories

"There’s a history of writing about this place that I’m participating in when I do it as directly as I did in Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude. That I’m conscious of certain points of reference, things like Call it Sleep by Henry Roth; and James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, and various other things. Certain early books by Bernard Malamud, you know these are points of reference for me, that encouraged me to delve into the material, and that I felt I was communing with, or communicating with, and replying to, while I was writing Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude. So, that is a kind of regional writing tradition, for sure."

In the Gotham Gazette, Jonathan Lethem speaks about whether there's a "New York school of literature" that he belongs to.