Class struggle. Infirm secondary superheroes. Suicidal sheep. And sex that literally knocks you into a different time zone. It’s all in Jonathan Lethem’s new collection of short stories, “A Different Kind of Tension” (Ecco).
But why would we, at Streetsblog, care about a writer who has bent literary genres for three-plus decades as he’s bounded between California and Brooklyn with nary a thought for the car culture against which we rage daily? Why would we care about the author of two acclaimed novels — “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Brooklyn Crime Novel” — that are among the greatest in American literature when they don’t even offer a morsel of a subplot about how cars ruined our cities and distorted land use across our nation?
Why? Because we’re just flat-out fans of the 61-year-old author. So when the new collection came out, we rushed to the library (come on, we’re fans, but paying for a book? We were born at night, but not last night!) and couldn’t believe our eyes: An entire short story, “Program’s Progress” (1990) devoted not just to car culture, but to the velvet handcuffs of autocracy, all in one delectable bon-bon.
So with permission from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, we offer it (for free!) to our readers. But do us a favor: go out and buy the book (we promised Lethem the excerpt would move copies).
Read that at the link below, and take a gander at today’s news headlines before you go on to a restful holiday weekend:
Actually, intercity buses go a lot more places now.
“Strong reforms are necessary in California if we’re going to have public transit agencies that are successful,” says this week’s guest.
