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

—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jonathan Lethem’s genre-defying fiction weaves the conventions of noirs, westerns, science fiction, and graphic novels into something both evocative and wholly original. The “bard of Brooklyn” (LitHub) is the author of more than a dozen books—including the much-lauded novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

Describing his 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.”

The award-winning Motherless Brooklyn is Lethem’s breakthrough novel, a detective story ceaselessly interrupted by outbursts from its highly unconventional narrator, a Tourettes-plagued private investigator named Lionell Essrog. Combining noirish literary tropes with a punch of the unpredictable, Motherless Brooklyn boasts “dialogue [that] crackles with caustic hilarity… Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist” (The Boston Globe). Wrote The Denver Post, “Jonathan Lethem has turned a genre on its ear. He doesn’t just push the envelope, he gives it a swift kick.”

“Lethem has intense gifts; nothing he writes is a waste of time.”

—The New York Times

The Fortress of Solitude depicts the intricate codes of childhood street life Lethem navigated growing up in 1970s Brooklyn, when the neighborhood was rife with race and class tensions. His other novels include Chronic City, a New York Times Best Book of 2009, unfolds in an alternate-universe Manhattan, following a burned-out child star and a pop culture critic as they uncover mysteries and pursue truth; The Feral Detective, a neo-Western detective story; You Don’t Love Me Yet, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art; and Dissident Gardens, an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals. His most recent is The Arrest, a postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car. “Inventive and intelligent” (Booklist), the novel is “as with so much of his work… inventive, entertaining and superbly written” (The New York Times). Lethem followed that up in a return to his old haunts with the “deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny” (Namwali Serpell) Brooklyn Crime Novel. A sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, Lethem weaves together many characters and storylines over fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood. It may not be the final word on Dean Street from one of its most beloved literary sons, but it is certainly his most definitive.

“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime ‘time’? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.”

—Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

Lethem’s nonfiction, which includes essays on writing and music, is as compelling and observant as his fiction. With Kevin Dettmar, Lethem edited Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z. The New York Times Book Review called it “excellent… a feast of rock writing, freewheelin’, funny, and deep.” In More Alive and Less Lonely, Lethem offers us a decade’s work of his incisive, passionate writing on writing. “Lethem is literature’s ultimate fanboy,” wrote The New York Times Book Review. PM Press issued his most recent collection of short works The Collapsing Frontier in 2024, grouping various essays, recent short fictions, a new interview, plus a “Secret Bibliography” for the book as part of their Outspoken Authors series. He’ll engage the form again with the 2025 release of A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories, a collection spanning three decades that will present the career-defining works of a genre-defying short story master.

Before turning to prose, Lethem attended art school and grew up in his father’s studio inspiring the creation of thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and animated shorts. In his book, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, Lethem pays homage to visual art and storytelling through a collection of full-color images, original essays delving into his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture; and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home. Kirkus praises the book as “astute, often idiosyncratic responses to works of art.” At the heart of Cellophane Bricks is a sketch of an artist’s life as told by an assemblage of ephemera, observations, and stories.

In 2021, Lethem was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library, an honor that recognizes individuals who make significant cultural and educational contributions to the world. He also holds an honorary doctorate by the Pratt Institute and is the second-ever Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College, succeeding David Foster Wallace. 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 served as a guest director at the 45th Annual Telluride Film Festival.

For more information on Jonathan Lethem, please visit him on Facebook and at jonathanlethem.com.