Lethem.

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and a newly published essay collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, granted an interview with Bloomberg News. Asked to comment on his native borough from his new home in sunny California, Mr. Lethem gave the following response:

It's been made blander, a little more accessible and it's taken over the world. For me as a writer, I was reading Henry Miller's "Black Spring" when I was 15, and thinking of him running around in Williamsburg.

It gave me permission to talk about what I knew, what I felt in my bones about growing up there and being from this very complicated, marvelous place, because other people had laid some tracks for me.

These are your N+1

"They’re the precursor of this kind of synthesis of extrainstitutional intellectualism, native to the Internet, native to the city dweller,” said the author of Chronic City, referring to a group of hyper-literate N+1 types running The New Inquiry in an article for The New York Times. Oy.

Let's see what we're working with here:

The New Inquiry is edited by Rachel Rosenfelt, 26, who graduated from Barnard College in 2009. Though she had some luck finding work, her exposure to the literary establishment left her unimpressed. “It killed my interest in publishing,” she said of her internship at The New Yorker during her freshman year. “It just felt like they had all ‘arrived.’ It was boring. No one talked. The only real rule was, ‘Don’t mess this up.’ ”

Atossa Abrahamian, 25, an editor, has written for New York magazine. Sarah Leonard, 23, is an associate editor at Dissent. Mr. Harris, 22, who was sifting through grad-school rejection notices a year ago, has written for N + 1 and Utne Reader and has been called out by Glenn Beck on television...

Continuing around the circle, Ms. Fitzgerald, the would-be magazine writer, read from “The Cantos,” by Ezra Pound. Mr. Osterweil, the frustrated novelist, read from Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.” Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)

Yeah sure, they sound all very sophisticated now, but give them a couple months on the island and they'll be running around with a conch shell determining whose turn it is to read from Discourse on Method, and parading around Keith Gessen's head on a sharp pole.

At the appointed time, Mr. Lethem and playwright Lynn Nottage—along with of-the-moment novelist Jennifer Egan—arrived with a small entourage of camera people. The three literary powerhouses—who among them share two Pulitzer prizes, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two MacArthur awards and two National Book Critics Circle awards—were welcomed by eager lit-fans and indifferent bystanders. Per usual, the climate at the park was that of camaraderie, mildew and unrest.

Dressed in a velvety blue blazer, grey Nike tennis shoes and tortoise shell glasses, Mr. Lethem adressed the modest crowd, “This is a lucky day for me to stand before you. I wish I could offer something in return to what you’ve given me.”

The author—whose collection The Ecstasy of Influence was just released by Doubleday (a subsidiary of Bertlesmann)—condemned the cynical press and unruly corporate regimes, while asserting they’re merely as-yet-unconverted members of the 99%.

He compared O.W.S. to the greatest service call of all time. “Even those who sneer or berate,” he proclaimed, “they’re one of you—one of us—just not willing—not yet—to see it. What do you do with a call like that? Best is to summon these words: ‘I’d like to speak to your supervisor’ and when the so-called supervisor appears, now your supervisor. And so on up the line!”
He closed with insistence an that O.W.S. push for more fiscal responsibility in regards to big business.

Afterward, The Observer asked about the artist’s place in O.W.S. and Mr. Lethem made himself clear: “An equal place to any other citizen, with no particular privileges. I wouldn’t presume any more than that.”

Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan and Lynn Nottage

Ms. Egan chose not to address the protesters, but tagged along to support Mr. Lethem. “I had never been here before,” she told us. “I was curious to be an observer,” she said. “I am not against speaking, but I think you should speak when you really know what you want to say.”

Ms. Nottage knew what she wanted to say. Clutching two sheets of typed prose, she adressed the crowd, “As a writer I believe firmly in the power of the narrative, and somehow our national narrative has been corrupted. Our story used to be simple; it was driven by the notion that hard work, compassion and community meant something.”

The playwright imparted sentiments similar to Mr. Lethem’s: “I’m not a megaphone of the movement. I am just one of many voices in a collective movement. I am not just here to shout louder than anyone else, but to be part of the den.”

"The Ecstasy of Influence" by Jonathan Lethem. (Courtesy Doubleday)

In his preface, Mr. Lethem acknowledges his debt to Mailer, describing Advertisements for Myself as “the template for throwing fiction, poetry, letters, etc., into the same collection, along with so much preening apparatus.” It’s that “preening apparatus” that made Advertisements interesting, and that Mr. Lethem imitates with aplomb. Mailer wasn’t content to gather up his miscellaneous short works and write a preface; he had to comment on his selections, too, providing context, analysis and even misgivings. One way to describe Advertisements is to call it a blog in book form, and at one point, Mr. Lethem apologetically refers to his own collection as “bloggish.” Both are cases of the kind of book that only a novelist with some degree of personal celebrity would ever dream of putting out.

Mr. Lethem’s fame was more gradually attained than Mailer’s, but both writers helped define a prevailing literary aesthetic. In Mailer’s case, it was the personal, first-person style of New Journalism, which he pioneered in The Village Voice, a paper he co-founded. Mr. Lethem’s aesthetic has been called, for lack of a better term, “genre-bending.” It’s a technique that mixes genres in unexpected ways, often elevating pulp fiction devices by deploying them in narratives otherwise driven by language and character. Mr. Lethem describes his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, as “Philip K. Dick meets Raymond Chandler.” His breakthrough novel, 1999’s Motherless Brooklyn, also had Chandleresque elements, mixing detective novel tropes with a hyperrealistic narrator who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. He followed this with his highly acclaimed novel The Fortress of Solitude, a Bildungsroman set in pregentrified, 1970s Brooklyn, whose plot hinges on a magic ring that grants superhero abilities.

Many contemporary writers have toyed with this genre-poaching method, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz and Colson Whitehead among them. But Mr. Lethem disagrees with critics who suggest that writers of his generation are influencing one another directly. Instead, he argues, it’s the natural impulse of a generation whose formative influences come from comic books, movies and television. And in this, he may be too modest. Would Mr. Whitehead’s recently published novel, Zone One, which takes as its point of departure the 1970s zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, have been so quickly embraced if Mr. Lethem had not laid the groundwork with his comic book-infected The Fortress of Solitude? And without Mr. Lethem, would Jennifer Egan have described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad as inspired, in equal measure, by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and HBO’s long-running series The Sopranos? For better and for worse, Mr. Lethem is part of a vanguard of Gen-X writers whose M.O. is to put a literary gloss on their pop culture enthusiasms.

Mr. Lethem would quibble with “pop culture,” finding it snobbish. He prefers “vernacular culture,” since many of his pulp influences are not popular at all, but cultish and strange. “The science-fiction writers I knew functioned like poets, mining for tribal rewards, names unknown elsewhere, and no thought of quitting their day jobs—yet you’d still hear literary novelists slight ‘commercial writing.’” Mr. Lethem is charmed by sci-fi’s self-sufficiency and suspicious of his desire to be an ambassador to the genre, referring to his own efforts as a “gentrification campaign.” In a long, moving tribute to his literary hero, Philip K. Dick, he worries that his love, once simple, is now of a “colonizing, acquisitive variety.” Much of The Ecstasy of Influence, and perhaps Mr. Lethem’s sensibility in general, is about his struggle to reconcile his loyalties to both genre and literary communities.

At the heart of The Ecstasy of Influence is an essay by the same name, which was first published in Harper’s in 2007. Subtitled “a plagiarism,” the essay argued against unnecessarily restrictive copyright laws through the liberal use of unattributed quotations. When published, it was greeted with joy by information-wants-to-be-free Internet gurus and befuddlement by writers who wondered if Mr. Lethem was calling for the death of quotation marks. Four years later, Mr. Lethem admits the essay may have “contradicted itself internally,” as it “tried to occupy abandoned acreage in the middle of a battlefield, between the extremes of copyright-abolitionist anarchy and ... the romantic notion of the capital-A Artist in a Promethean vacuum.” Ultimately, the essay led him to think more deeply about influence and to gather his writings about the subject into one volume.

So, who are Mr. Lethem’s influences? To name a few, in no particular order: Italo Calvino, Robert Altman, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Don DeLillo, Shirley Hazzard, Thomas Berger, H.P. Lovecraft, L.J. Davis, James Baldwin, Muriel Spark, Vivian Gornick, Lester Bangs, Raymond Chandler and Nietzsche. Mr. Lethem also pays homage to the visual artists who have influenced his work, never forgetting that his first ambition was to be a painter, like his father. A love of music is evident throughout The Ecstasy of Influence, and in a long profile of Bob Dylan, Mr. Lethem brings new insight to an artist whose work has been discussed prodigiously by others. Although Mr. Dylan’s influences are as transparent as Mr. Lethem’s, his relationship to them is less tormented. Interviewing Mr. Dylan, Mr. Lethem asks him what Alicia Keyes did to deserve mention in the song “Thunder on the Mountain.” Mr. Dylan’s laid-back answer is, “There’s nothing about that girl I don’t like.” The exchange reveals everything about these two artists’ different approaches.

Mr. Lethem also discusses more general influences: his father, Brooklyn and the culture of used bookstores, which he worked in for many years as a clerk before being able to support himself as a writer. He’s most confessional, though, on the subject of his career trajectory. He refers self-deprecatingly to his “plan” to become a writer, one that led him to drop out of college, hitchhike across the country, and even get a tattoo inspired by Dick’s Ubik. He’s not entirely proud of the tattoo, or of the fact that he never managed to complete his degree, and chides himself for clinging to bohemian ideals more appropriate to his parent’s generation. He’s also aware of the ways his romanticism became muddled with his love of sci-fi, writing with irony about his desire to legitimize a community that couldn’t care less about the ivory tower. “I needed to come from Pulpland, an underdog script someone should have talked me out of.” When his own work received mainstream notice, he was as bewildered as he was relieved. Suddenly, his writing was being solicited from mainstream quarters he had long assumed were out of reach. A MacArthur Fellowship gave him the luxury of time, and he found himself unable to turn down queries from even the tiniest publications. “For 10 years I said yes to everything.”

The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited. If admitting that embarrasses Mr. Lethem (and it seems to, at times), he should turn to Mailer as a counterexample. After publishing The Naked and the Dead to great acclaim, Mailer found himself ill-equipped for a life in the spotlight. In Advertisements for Myself, he admits, “I spent ... years trying to gobble up the experiences of a victorious man when I was still no man at all, and had no real gift for enjoying life. Such a gift usually comes from a series of small victories artfully achieved.” Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it.

editorial@observer.com

Painted between 1971 and 1974, the three panels of Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych are a combined 14 feet long and seven feet high. They demand from even casual viewers a proportionately big reaction. Under the painting's spell, certain words spring inexorably to mind: rapturous and beatific, a monist revelation assembled from dozens of small-scale epiphanies; a summer shrine and relic offering the spiritually parched parishioners of New York art a site of pilgrimage and object of veneration. Such language has long since been drained of theological content--novels can be rapturous, dinners revelatory and pilgrims drawn to athletic halls of fame without tugging on long chains of signification that leave them cuffed to the hands of an angry god. With its overt symbology--a bearded man, a modest woman and a knowing infant stare back at us with the otherworldly gazes of Byzantine icons--this holy family, Jewish like the original, is dressed in the diaphanous plaid skirt, stripped bell-bottoms and work boots of late hippiedom; the child is a girl; the pastoral landscape outside isn't Nazareth but post-Holocaust Germany--The Fulbright Triptych doesn't let its secular admirers off the hook so easily. 

"I think it would take a certain kind of painting to warrant this," Mr. Dinnerstein said. "For instance, the painting by van Eyck called The Adoration of the Lamb, the Ghent Altarpiece. It's massive. It's all about parts of the Bible, about Adam and Eve and the Last Judgment. It has a big story--and what's the big story [in contemporary art]?"

Mr. Dinnerstein was sitting about 15 feet away from The Fulbright Triptych at the Tenri Gallery, where it will be on display until June 9, when it moves uptown for a three-month show at the German Consulate that opens June 16. (Its permanent home is the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University.) 

"Here, there is a big story," Mr. Dinnerstein said. "It's about art. About the making of art. It can't be a religious story. A lot of that has been shattered. People don't have the same unanimity of belief. But art is a religion--that's something. So I had a feeling this would work."

"This" is The Suspension of Time (Milkweed Editions, 360 pages, $35.00), also out June 16, an anthology that, by its publisher's reckoning, is the only full-length art book entirely devoted to a single work by a single living artist. In the artist's telling, how The Fulbright Triptych--so boldly figurative, with its family trinity surrounded by postcard prints of old masters--became the first recipient of such a treatment in an era dominated by abstraction resembled, in itself, a series of Old Testament coincidences.

In 2005, Mr. Dinnerstein found himself seated at a Chinatown wedding banquet next to Daniel Slager, then an editor at Harcourt; their wives were a consultant and the principal, respectively, at P.S. 150 in Tribeca, but the men had never met. In the midst of acrobats and fire-eaters--it was a Chinese-French wedding--and in a cab shared back to Brooklyn, Messrs. Dinnerstein and Slager discussed European literature (the latter's authors included Umberto Eco and Jose Saramago) and became fast friends. 

Mr. Slager eventually moved to Minneapolis to become the publisher of Milkweed. Familiar with that independent house's art output--and its new boss's admiration for his work--Mr. Dinnerstein proposed a volume on The Fulbright Triptych. Needing to get his bearings at Milkweed, Mr. Slager put him off for a few months, then a few more.

"A strange thing happened right around then," Mr. Dinnerstein told The Observer. "I teach a class in drawing and painting in my studio in Brooklyn. And in that class, just around when Daniel Slager was coming [to New York on a visit], I was talking about someone I know who is very well-educated but had never gone to college. I said that I thought that that was very interesting, very appealing, that someone self-educates." The autodidact, a former art student of his, became a professional mathematician after being admitted into Columbia's Ph.D. program without an undergraduate degree.   

"And so this woman in my class said, 'My husband never went to college. You'll never guess what he does.'" The long-time student was married to David Rosenthal, then-publisher of Simon & Schuster.

"So I called him up and he said present the book as an anthology of writing. Don't present it as an art book because it's really a book about writing and that will focus the whole thing. He said, 'Make up a wish list of writers you think would find this intriguing. Put together a list of 70 names and maybe seven or eight will respond. I'll help you.'"

Repackaged as Mr. Rosenthal's anthology, Mr. Slager and Milkweed immediately agreed to the project. The contributors list eventually ran to nearly 50, from film theorists and museum directors to Brooklyn literati (Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem), an actor (John Turturro) and the former head of the German Fulbright Commission, giving the finished product the feel of a set of gospels, that is, a bunch of people telling the same story, embellished by hearsay, exegesis, hindsight. In brief, Mr. Dinnerstein--a somewhat provincial American Jew, from the time when Brooklyn was still the provinces--moves with his young wife to a small town in Germany on a Fulbright grant to learn printmaking. Three years, an immersion in the northern Renaissance tradition and the birth of a daughter later, the Triptych is back in New York, and completed.

   Though the beard is gray and the thick brown hair largely gone, Mr. Dinnerstein, at 68, is instantly recognizable as the male figure in The Fulbright Triptych. He occupies the right panel. His wife and infant daughter--teacher Renée and Simone, now a noted concert pianist--occupy the left. The center portion features twin windows, looking out on a deep-perspective view of a nondescript German village. It's the table below, show in even more extreme perspective, with a glowing flat disk at its center, that summons and flummoxes.

Like a Hogswartsian real-estate agent, Mr. Dinnerstein began an impromptu tour of his painting. "If you're right here, you can take in your right, take in your left, but when you go closer than this, you're almost in the space." We moved toward the table, into the artist's studio, and Mr. Dinnerstein pointed out the tools of the printmaker's trade: burins, scraper, burnisher. Back "out" in the Tenri Gallery, Angela's Garden, the copper plate "made" on this table, hangs on a wall--more tangible than its painted counterpart, but not by much. 

"And you get even closer"--we move closer--"you can literally read a lot of the stuff, like letter-by-letter, word-by-word, and so forth. It's kind of like an obsessive's obsessive."

The postcard van Eycks, Vermeers and Seurats make visual and narrative sense from the middle distance--a young painter pasting up inspirations. Only with a nose to the paint does the rest of the paper ephemera, arrayed around the figures like halos, give up their secrets: Handwritten aerograms. Typed quotations from Wittgenstein and Moby Dick. Drawings by Renée's students--crayon, watercolor and ballpoint pen, all uncannily transposed to oil paint.

Most remarkable of all, two tiny photo-booth strips of the mugging couple, one with Simone as a toddler and one before she was born. They evoke the early church's notion of acheiropoieta ("icons not made by hand")--a run-around of the graven-images commandment that proclaimed true icons, like the Shroud of Turin and many even less plausible examples, weren't paintings but rather mechanical and spiritual reproductions of the subject. 

A cell phone rang to the tune of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." Renée was on the line, and wondering when Simon would be back in Park Slope. Either The Fulbright Triptych had come to life, or life had come, again, to the Triptych. Either way, the effect was celestial.

editorial@observer.com

"For a while, I thought it was just really silly," he told them. "Now I'm beside myself with happiness, and I think it stands a chance in this coldhearted universe of ours."

We've heard of worse ideas. Plus, we know Broadway's looking for a superhero musical that doesn't threaten to break the bones of its actors.

Naturally, gentrification ('''a Nixon word,' as his parents saw it") is the theme du jour. But in addition to neighborhood name-changes and neglected Puerto Rican supermarkets, we get some less conventional signs of the times. For example: fewer communes.

As Lethem tells Wood while strolling down Dean Street:

These were very active, thriving communes well through the 70s and the 80s. I remember who had the best parties. The communes all had their own flavour - 222 Dean was hardcore Maoist. And then there was 166 that was much more, you know, quasi-Black Panther, druggy, a little more American indigenous terrorist feeling to it. That was my favorite place. It was where I first heard reggae, for one thing. And it was where I first snuck a pot brownie off the parents' table, pretending to think it was just a regular brownie, even sort of to myself.

Those were the days!

The eye-catching photo, taken from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building by Scott Peterman, shows a city that is churning and gleaming ominously. Every light in every office window appears to be on, as if every building in the frame is coursing with electricity. Mr. Peterman said the photo, titled Surge, was conceived specifically for the Portfolio cover as an homage to a similar shot taken during the Great Depression from the exact same spot on the observation deck, by Berenice Abbott.

The obvious question: Is it a bad omen that Mr. Lethem’s new novel dons artwork that was commissioned for the inaugural issue of a magazine that imploded after just two years?

Nah, says Doubleday director of publicity Alison Rich. “We’ve heard nothing but excitement and enthusiasm for this book among booksellers and critics,” she said in an email, “and we’re tremendously excited for its publication in October.”

There is something different about the image as it appears on the front of the Lethem book, and according to Mr. Peterman, that’s no accident.

“The one that was on the Portfolio cover was sort of turned gold—it’s got a Photoshop gold wash on it,” said the photographer. “Everything was golden then.”

As Portfolio’s former editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, put it when asked to describe why Mr. Peterman’s photo was chosen for the magazine’s debut: “We knew we were in the midst of a bubble, and we knew we were in the middle of this new Gilded Age. Our photo was intended to be a commentary on the times. It was beautiful, but it was also supposed to be ironic.”

The designer Rodrigo Corral, who worked on the Lethem jacket for Doubleday, said he was aware of the photo’s origins. “When I saw this photograph of the skyscrapers I thought it was perfect for the book,” he said in an email. “It creates the illusion, facade of golden Utopia.” Though the photo was originally used to illustrate New York City’s might as a business center, he said, it “now feels quite the opposite: a vulnerable city.”

Ms. Rich confirmed in an email that Mr. Peterman’s photo—for which the publishing house bought rights directly from the photographer—was altered in the course of the design process, using “shadowing and other special effects.”

In publishing, this signals the start of a season that many believe has the best chance of any in recent memory to redeem the industry after one of its darkest years, and to show that, even in 2009, big, beautiful hit books are still possible. 

Many publishers are saying their fall catalogs are their strongest in years, and after last fall, an unqualified disaster that left the industry demoralized and diminished, much is at stake as their hopes are tested. As one publishing veteran put it, “if this fall doesn’t work out, a lot more of us will not have jobs next year.”

Scribner has it all on the line for Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, for which they paid $5 million in March. HarperCollins has Michael Crichton’s posthumous pirate book. Knopf Doubleday is preparing for blockbusters by Pat Conroy, Jon Krakauer, and of course, Dan Brown--whose Lost Symbol will be a marathon of a publishing job by itself, but one that promises to pay the division’s rent for years and bring stability to the entire Random House castle.

Such foolproof commercial juggarnauts help publishers and booksellers sleep at night, but the literary-minded among them can cheer too-- holy autumn! What a bunch of novels!

Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming on August 4, as does Richard Russo. Random House is publishing a novel by E. L. Doctorow on September 1st. A week after that, Knopf brings out Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Nan Talese follows with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux comes in a little later with Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. In October there will be memoirs from Edmund White and Michael Chabon, and new novels from Jonathan Lethem, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, and Dave Eggers. November (think: holiday gifts) will see the publication of new works from Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, and even Vladimir Nabokov. 

Such moments of confluence are rare. Depending on your metric, truly memorable ones tend to come around once every decade or so.

The start of 1985 saw Don Delillo’s White Noise and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian published in the space of a few weeks. The next time it happened was 1997, when Delillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Haruki Marukami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Roth’s American Pastoral were published within months of each other. The last instance any of the people interviewed for this article brought up was the fall of 2006, which saw the publication of Eggers’ What is the What, Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Powers’ The Echo Maker, Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

Such windfalls stick in one’s memory, and having lived through one, you look forward to the next. 

“It was exciting,” said Granta editor John Freeman of fall 2006, who until recently was a full-time freelance book critic. “It’s sort of like Christmas come early. Suddenly there was a period like: big novel, big novel, big novel. I had this slightly neurotic sense like, surely all these books can’t be this good-- but they were! Which was quite nice, because normally you get one good one, and then, you know, some other books.”  

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.  

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”

Predictably, there are some who say this fall is nothing special-- that book publishing whips itself into a frenzy every year around this time. 

“The notion that a killer line-up of books is headed to the stores is a fantasy that big corporate publishers entertain every year starting in spring,” said one editor at a major house. “After they’ve dug out from the post-Christmas returns and begun to face the fact that their spring titles aren’t working.”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to make up,” he said. “And if we can’t do it with books like this, that’s a bad thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

—Additional reporting by Eliza Shapiro and Molly Fischer

As former New York Sun literary editor Tom Meaney explained it to us last year, “If you’re reading a galley on the subway, and someone comes to talk to you, you’re going to share a lot of things in common with them. You can have the right jeans or the right purse or whatever … but if you’re reading How Fiction Works in March, you know, three months before the book comes out, and you get the one girl who is interested in James Wood, well …”

Well, indeed! How Fiction Works was without a doubt one of last year’s most sought-after status galleys. Others included Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Philip Roth’s Indignation. 

Getting on the subway yesterday and spotting someone with a Penguin Group totebag, we wondered: what are this summer’s status galleys? Are there any, or is everyone just anonymously reading Kindles now, as suggested by James Wolcott in this month’s Vanity Fair? 

We made some calls this morning and turns out there are a bunch! 

Joshua Ferris’s January 2010 novel The Unnamed, of which Reagan Arthur Books handed out more than a thousand copies during Book Expo in May, is among them, as is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, which comes out in September. 

Consensus seems to be that the ultimate status galley this season has been Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but actually it’s coming out in three weeks, and according to Tracy Locke, the publicist at Penguin Press, finished books are already being sent out relatively widely. But for a while there, only a very few people could claim to possess the ARC: per Ms. Locke, “They were ... on a very, very, very limited galley distribution. Basically what I did was I looked at what people’s deadlines were, so I went to all the monthlies first, and I sent them out as late as possible. It certainly would qualify as a status galley—we did our best to keep it under wraps.”

Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said that his author Sam Lipsyte’s follow-up to Home Land has been getting a lot of interest. “People really keep calling me to ask when we'll be able to show them Lipsyte,” Mr. Stein said in an email. “I've never had to answer that question so many times. The answer is: galleys by August 5. (And it's really great-looking.)”

Other books people mentioned include Richard Powers’ September novel Generosity: An Enhancement, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, both of which come out in October, and Mary Karr’s November memoir Lit. Sloane Crosley, the publicist at Vintage, suggested Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, which comes out next week but which was never distributed in galley, and the Otto Penzler–edited doorstop volume The Vampire Archives, which Vintage will publish in October and at this early stage is only in the hands of 200 people. 

Plus, Philip Roth once again has a new book coming out, this one called The Humbling and scheduled for publication in November. According to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publicity department, there are 300 copies of that one floating around among critics and editors (500 if you include the ones sent to booksellers) but it’s already stirring buzz on the Twittersphere. Early last month blogger—and occasional book critic for The Observer!—Molly Young tweeted that she was about to go “wait near the mailbox till my galley of Philip Roth's upcoming THE HUMBLING arrives.” 

We caught up with Ms. Young over email this morning and asked her whether it had ever come. It had! Would she describe it?

“The cover is a grayish-pebble color and the book is very, very slim,” Ms. Young reported. “Almost pamphlet-sized. With big type. The cover looks like a typical Glaser cover, unobtrusive but immediately recognizable.” 

How did she happen to be among the lucky few to receive the book?  

“A kind editor sent me the book as a favor,” she said. “He was aware that I like Roth a lot—especially short Roth novels with lots of sex in them—and agreed to let me have a peek. The provision was that I not review or quote from the book, since there were future changes to be (possibly) made.”

She said she hadn’t spent any time reading The Humbling in public, and so could not say whether it worked the way a status galley is expected to. 

“[I] read it strictly in private, mostly because the content was racy enough to make me squirm,” Ms. Young said. “It's a very titillating book and I like to maintain a noble bearing in public, so this was not the reading material to support that goal."  She added: "Plus, if I saw someone reading a covetable ARC in public I'd interpret it as a weird passive mating call. I guess it's no worse than wearing an obscure band T-shirt—you're advertising your taste in hopes of attracting the select few who value that same object. But romances predicated on taste are sort of doomed, no? It's a flimsy pretext."