Jonathan Lethem Answers your Questions

Q: You published your first novel, “Gun, with Occasional Music,” in 1994, a year after the Web browser Mosaic was publicly released, transforming the way people traversed the Internet and contributing to its rapid expansion. Can you remember when you first went online? Do you think you’d be the same writer if you’d grown up with the Internet?

A: Very few people anymore even recall that I wrote that novel, as a strong young man in his twenties, on horseback. The process is almost unimaginable—I doubt I could even hoist those gigantic splintery quill pens into my arms these days, let alone repeatedly douse their nibs with elk’s blood and charge a stand of birch trees. . . .

Excerpt from the New Yorker