Jonathan Lethem Takes Inventory Of Literature’s Enormous Fake Pharmacy

“The current generation of fictional drugs, rather than bubbling up from nature’s underworld, parachute into stories and novels from the corporate-technological top down. The recent nightmare drugs — for they are, exclusively, nightmares — are pharmaceuticals. … The self’s integrity is under assault not by illicit indulgences but by capitalism’s imperative to market us shiny neurological upgrades — and by our complicit desire to be thus reworked.” — The New York Times Book Review