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 is the author of seven novels, a novella, two short story collections,
and a volume of essays that explore, in various ways, the relationship between
so-called high art and popular culture. Characterized by narrative leaps
between vastly divergent genres, his fiction 
weaves the conventions of noir
mysteries, westerns, science fiction, and comic books into coming-of-age tales
that are otherwise evocative and realistic in content.
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.”
His recent
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, he embeds his readers deeply within
the physical and social 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, Lethem’s earlier novel, Motherless
Brooklyn (1999), takes the form of a detective story that is ceaselessly
interrupted by the outbursts of 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 addition
to his books, Lethem is also an inventive and inexhaustible writer of short
stories and essays, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling
Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s as
well as variety of other periodicals and anthologies.Jonathan
Lethem studied at Bennington College (1982-84) and immersed himself in the culture
of literature by working as a bookseller at numerous bookshops in New York City and in Berkeley,
California. He lives in
Brooklyn and Maine
where he is at work on new writing projects.
Bio adapted courtesy of The MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org).
Selected Awards and Honors
2005 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant
1999 National Book Critics Circle for Motherless Brooklyn
Books
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)
Gun with Occasional Music (Harcourt Brace, 1994)
Selected Essays
“Uncried Tears” (O Magazine, June 2005)
“Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks” (Nerve, March 2005)
“So Who’s Perkus Tooth, Anyway?” (Washington Post Book World, 2005)
“The Beards” (The New Yorker, 2005)
“Rick James” (New York Times Magazine, December 2004)
Two Or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes (Granta, July 2004)
“My Marvel Years” (London Review of Books, April 2004)
“Charles Dickens, Animal Novelist” (The Believer, April 2003)
For more information on Jonathan Lethem and his work, please visit www.jonathanlethem.com.
Aside from being one of the most inventive writers on the planet, Lethem is also one of the funniest.
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
▪
[Lethem] captures precisely–as only a great novelist can–how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass.
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys
▪
[The Disappointment Artist] is a gem of a book... Heartbreaking... Mesmerizing... A form of smuggled autobiography...With a few deft strokes, the reader is left with a vivid image of Lethem’s childhood.
—The New York Observer
Motherless Brooklyn is] The best novel of the year…Utterly original and deeply moving.
--Esquire
▪
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
▪
Wonderfully inventive, slightly absurdist...[Motherless Brooklyn] is funny and sly, clever, compelling, and endearing.
--USA Today
The Fortress of Solitude is a funny and very sad book, exceptionally well made and keenly observed...what lots of contemporary novels mean to be and few are: both intimate and vast, giving us social and private realities without seeming to falsify either...Lethem has done something remarkable.
—Benjamin Kunkel, Los Angeles Times
