"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.”

His most recent novel, 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, 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. He also 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 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. Lethem recently authored the 10-part revival of the popular 1970s comic Omega the Unknown, which was published by Marvel in 2007-8. The series was nominated in the Best Limited Series category for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award.  He is the only writer to be included in both of 2008's Year's Best Stories and Year's Best Essays volumes.

Lethem is currently working on another novel set in New York City during the 1950’s and 60’s, as well as a major collection of his essays and cultural critiques. His monograph on John Carpenter’s subversive science fiction classic They Live will be published late in 2010.

Selected Awards and Honors

• 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
  

Books

• 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)
• 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.

To read a review of Chronic City in the New York Times, click here.

To see an interview with him at the Cleveland Art Institute, click here.