If you are interested in reading Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, you might like these other readalikes…

Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
This richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel is about fate and fortune—about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way—and not—in New York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.

Zoë Heller, The Believers
The highly anticipated new novel from the author of the acclaimed What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal is a rich, comic chronicle of one family’s struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt.

Richard Price, Lush Life
Lush Life is a tale of two lower east sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. Jennifer Reese of Entertainment Weekly calls it “a big, powerful novel… Its real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street… Outstanding.”

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
Eric Packer, age 28, is a billionaire asset manager, and on this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a destructive bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Cosmopolis is a vivid novel with extraordinary pace. DeLillo’s insight into the impact of money on every aspect of culture—from art to real estate to politics to time itself—is stunning.

Hyatt Bass, The Embers
A once-charmed family is forced to confront the devastating tragedy that struck it years ago in this fiercely tender tale of betrayal and reconciliation. From Library Journal: “Bass’s well-paced, nuanced family saga is as engrossing as it is empathetic. Sure to appeal to readers who enjoy such family dramas as Judith Guest’s Ordinary People.”

Jay McInerney, The Good Life
In The Good Life, Jay McInerney unveils a story of love, family, conflicting desires, and catastrophic loss in his most powerfully searing work thus far. “The Good Life is McInerney’s most fully imagined novel as it is his most ambitious and elegiac.” —The New York Review of Books

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
First published in 1985-1986, The New York Trilogy (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”) broke ground in its mix of serious fictional techniques and detective and mystery genres. Geoffrey O’Brien of The Village Voice wrote: “The New York Trilogy are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to inhabit it. . . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have initiated a whole new round of storytelling.” 

Fans of Jonathan Lethem should also check out the following authors:

Michael Chabon

J. Robert Lennon

Dave Eggers

Thomas Pynchon

Jonathan Safran Foer