Photographs by Christian Movila
Jonathan Lethem—the author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, his semiautobiographical novel that lovingly details the Boerum Hill neighborhood—has long been one of the borough's major boosters. So when we asked him to pick his favorite New York moments in fiction, we were surprised that only one is set at home. Maybe that's because Lethem's next novel, Chronic City, is located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Or maybe it's that Lethem believes that Manhattan has always been ripe for storytelling. Fantasy—whether the imagined lives glimpsed on Atlantic Avenue in Paula Fox's Desperate Characters, or the possibility of becoming Marie Antoinette for a night in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—is woven into the city's fabric, he believes. "Even the title of Washington Irving's A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker, is deceptive, he says. "It's full of lies and tall tales and grotesque myths." But they clean up nicely.
