Events

Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers--and her father's boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father, "before Hitler, everyone got along"? It was only many years later, when she heard the remarkable story of the Torah from that very village being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht, that Schwartz began to sense how much these stories might mean. Thus began a remarkable twelve-year quest that covered three continents as Schwartz sought answers in the historical records and among those who remembered that time. We need these stories to provide a moral compass, especially in times of political extremism, when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion.

The acclaimed author ofMotherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roarwith this gorgeous, stunning portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their owndelusions, desires and lies. In Chronic City, Chase Insteadman, ahandsome, in offensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residualsearned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called "Martyr &Pesty." His teenage sweetheart and fiancee, Janice Trumbull, is trapped bya layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which shesends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase isadrift. Into Chase's cloistered city enters pop critic Perkus Tooth, who drawsChase into another Manhattan, questioning what is real. Like Manhattan itslef,Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastatingand antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.