Novelist Jonathan Lethem, official voice of Brooklyn to bookworms everywhere, takes a UK reporter on a gentrification-themed tour of his borough stomping grounds (including "small, secretly hip" Gowanus) and shares the pain of letting his parents' Dean Street brownstone slip through his fingers. (They bought it for $21,000 in 1967 and sold it just before property values took off.) On his craft: "I didn't set out to write a great Brooklyn novel, or a Brooklyn novel at all. I set out to write the great novel of Dean Street between Bond and Nevins, on a certain summer's day in 1972." [Guardian]
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