There is something to Phillip Lopate that may make his followers feel particularly close to him, as if his work were known solely by them and a select few others; that this is not true, that he is in fact an immensely respected writer and scholar, would seem of little importance to these readers.

With his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem received the attention of a new novelist of curious note, greeted as a potentially new breed of genre-referencing, sincere post-modernist storytellers whose acrobatic prose style and wild narratives garnered, more often tha