Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist

"Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination."

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jonathan Lethem’s genre-bending fiction weaves the conventions of noir mysteries, westerns, science fiction, and comic books into coming-of-age tales that are evocative and wholly original.  He is the author of eight novels—including the much lauded Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—and is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

In describing his own work, Lethem says, “Everything I write is informed by genre traditions, which I love deeply. At the same time, I don’t think I’ve written without straining against genre boundaries, and I’ve often violated them outright. I think my work reveals traces of an extremely eclectic reading history, and my narrative is also particularly informed by film. But my dearest models are nearly all twentieth-century Americans pursuing high art through popular forms: Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, John Ford, Charles Willeford, George Herriman, and Patricia Highsmith, for instance.”

The Ecstasy of Influence, a major collection of his essays and cultural critiques, will be released in November 2011, as will The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, the final work of the epic science fiction writer, of which Lethem co-edited with Pamela Jackson, cumulated from thousands of pages of typed and hand-written notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches.

Chronic City (2009), a New York Times Best Book of 2009, unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan, centering around the lives of a burned-out child star and a pop culture critic as they uncover mysteries and pursue truth.  Other novels include You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007), a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art; and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), which depicts the intricate codes of childhood street life he navigated while growing up in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn during the 1970s, a time when the neighborhood was gentrifying and rife with race and class tensions.

Demonstrating keen powers of observation and description, Lethem transports his readers to the worlds his characters inhabit: in the schoolyards, on the stoops, and in the midst of the energetic dialogue and pop riffs that pulse throughout. Fortress is “a flawlessly evoked, original, and vividly imagined (or is it remembered?) account of two boys, white and black, growing up in not-yet-gentrified Brooklyn in a decade of both freedom and urban rot” (Entertainment Weekly). 

While comic book motifs appear in Fortress, the award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999) takes the form of a detective story that is ceaselessly interrupted by the outbursts from its highly unconventional narrator, a Tourettes-plagued private investigator named Lionell Essrog. By orchestrating such allusions to popular genres within his fiction, Lethem heightens emotional engagement with his characters, blurs boundaries across a broad spectrum of cultural creations, and expands the frontier of American fiction. 

‘Who but Jonathan Lethem would attempt a half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette’s syndrome? …The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity…Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist…Unexpectedly moving.”

—The Boston Globe

In the spring of 2010, Lethem was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Pratt Institute and became the second Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College, succeeding David Foster Wallace. This prestigious appointment at one of the nation’s premier liberal arts colleges is a fitting acknowledgment of Lethem’s contributions to contemporary American literature and creative culture.

Lethem’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Granta, and McSweeney’s. He also authored the 10-part revival of the popular 1970s comic Omega the Unknown, which was published by Marvel in 2007-8. Lethem is currently working on another novel set in New York in the 1950's and 60's.

Selected Writings

• The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (Forthcoming, Doubleday, 2011)
  
• The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Editor; Forthcoming, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
  
• Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009)
• You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday, 2007)
• The Disappointment Artist: Essays (Doubleday, 2005)
• Men and Cartoons: Stories (Doubleday, 2004)
• The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003)
• This Shape We’re In (McSweeney’s, 2000)
• Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday, 1999)
• Girl in Landscape (Doubleday, 1998)
• As She Climbed Across the Table (Doubleday, 1997)
• Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye (Harcourt Brace, 1996)
• Amnesia Moon (Harcourt Brace, 1995)
  
  

Awards
2011 Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, Criticism (for The Ecstasy of Influence)
2009  Eisner Award Nominee (for Omega The Unknown, Best Limited Series)
2005  MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant
1999  National Book Critics Circle for Motherless Brooklyn
1997  World Fantasy Award winner

Media

Bomb Live! interviews Jonathan Lethem at the Cleveland Institute of Art:



Open Book interviews Jonathan Lethem about becoming a writer:



The Paris Review: Jonathan Lethem print interview

National Public Radio: Jonathan Lethem Interview on Fresh Air

For more information on Jonathan Lethem and his work please visit www.jonathanlethem.com.