Jonathan Lethem
Encyclopedia
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music
, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction
and detective fiction
, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn
, a National Book Critics Circle Award
-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude
, which became a New York Times Best Seller
. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
, to Judith Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde
painter. He was the eldest of three children. He is half-Jewish. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer. The family lived in a commune
in the pre-gentrified
Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill
). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his Bohemian
childhood as “thrilling” and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan
, saw Star Wars
twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction
writer Philip K. Dick
. Lethem later said Dick’s work was “as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel.”
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor
, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan
song Like a Rolling Stone
in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown
.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York
, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College
in Vermont
in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an “overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor....at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege.” This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked
from Denver
, Colorado
to Berkeley
, California
in 1984, across “a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done." He lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing in his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.
, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque
detective story, which includes talking kangaroo
s, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd pictured my first novels being published as paperback originals,” he recalled, "and instead a prestigious house was doing the book in cloth....I was in heaven." The novel was released to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek
, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel," catapulted the book to wider commercial success. Gun, with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award
, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine
reader's poll. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula
optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.
He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon
. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country, this second novel uses a road
narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table
, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.
In 1996, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area
back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape
. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty
while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders. Girl in Landscapes plot and characters, including the figures of a young girl and a violently protective father figure, were "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne
Western
The Searchers
, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."
, a return to the detective theme, this time maintaining objective realism while exploring subjective alterity
through Lionel Essrog. His protagonist has Tourette syndrome
and is obsessed with language. Lethem later said that Essrog "obviously [is] the character I’ve written with whom I most identify," and explained that the novel "stands outside myself .... It’s the only one that doesn’t need me, never did. It would have found someone to write it, by necessity." Upon its publication in 1999, Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger
for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire
. In 1999, Edward Norton
announced that he was planning to write, direct and star in a film adaptation of the novel. In March 2007, Norton said he was still working on the screenplay.
According to The New York Times
, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster
celebrity," and he was referred to several times as a "genre
bender." Critics cited the variety of Lethem's novels, which were alternately hardboiled detective fiction, science fiction, and autobiographical. (Lethem credited his comfort in genre-mixing to his father's art, which "always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously.") In Time
magazine, Lev Grossman
classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon
(with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood
, and Susanna Clarke
.
In 2003, Lethem responded to the issue of "genre bending":
In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000). This Shape We're In was one of the first offerings from McSweeney's
Books, the publishing imprint
that developed from Dave Eggers'
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
.
In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big, sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003, as The Fortress of Solitude
. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman
features dozens of characters in a variety of milieus, but features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn
during the late 1970s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill
. It was named one of nine "Editor's Choice" books of the year by The New York Times
and has been published in fifteen languages.
Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In March 2005, The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was released. On September 20, 2005, Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship.
magazine; the interview contained Lethem's reflections on Dylan's artistic achievements, and revealed Dylan's dissatisfaction with contemporary recording techniques and his thoughts on his own status.
After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided that "[i]t was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway …. I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." In 2007, he returned as a novelist to California
, where some of his earlier fiction had been set, with You Don't Love Me Yet
, a novel about an upstart rock band. The novel revolves around a woman in the band, Lucinda, who answers phones for her friend's complaint line and uses some of a caller's words as lyrics. According to Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet was inspired by the years he spent as the lead singer in an upstart California band in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what he called "the unformed posturing phase of life." The novel received mixed reviews.
In 2005, Lethem had announced that he was planning to revive the Marvel Comics
character Omega the Unknown
in a ten-issue series to be published in 2006. After hearing of the project, Omega co-creator Steve Gerber
expressed personal outrage over the use of the character without his participation, though he later discussed the project with Lethem and admitted that he had "misjudged" him. In May, 2006, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada
explained that the series had been delayed to 2007, saying that "winning the Macarthur Grant put additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem's] time." The revamped Omega the Unknown series was published in ten monthly issues from October, 2007 to July, 2008; the issues were published in a single volume in October, 2008.
In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City
, which was published on October 13, 2009. In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan
, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow
, Philip K. Dick
, Charles G. Finney
and Hitchcock
’s Vertigo
and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange."
His essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (2007) is a passionate defense of plagiarism
and a call for a return to a gift economy
in the arts. He writes "The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism" and "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you." The essay was included in his 2011 collection, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
In 2011, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Lethem, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Among other projects Lethem is currently working on short books about John Carpenter's
movie They Live
(published in October, 2010 as They Live) and the album Fear of Music
by Talking Heads
. Starting in 2011, he served as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College
, the position formerly held by David Foster Wallace
.
; they were divorced by 1997. In 2000, he married Julia Rosenberg, a Canadian film executive; they divorced two years later.
Lethem lives in Brooklyn and Berwick, Maine
, with his third wife, filmmaker Amy Barrett, and their son, Everett Barrett Lethem (b. May 23, 2007).
Novellas
Short story collections
Non-fiction
Comics
Films
Miscellaneous
Gun, with Occasional Music
Gun, with Occasional Music is a 1994 novel by Jonathan Lethem. It blends science fiction and hardboiled detective fiction. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994.-Plot:...
, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
and detective fiction
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn is a Jonathan Lethem detective story set in Brooklyn and published in 1999. Lethem's protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome, a disorder marked by involuntary tics...
, a National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude
The Fortress of Solitude (novel)
The Fortress of Solitude is a 2003 semi-autobiographical novel by Jonathan Lethem set in Brooklyn and spanning the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It follows two teenage friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, one white and one black, who discover a magic ring...
, which became a New York Times Best Seller
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, to Judith Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
painter. He was the eldest of three children. He is half-Jewish. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer. The family lived in a commune
Commune (intentional community)
A commune is an intentional community of people living together, sharing common interests, property, possessions, resources, and, in some communes, work and income. In addition to the communal economy, consensus decision-making, non-hierarchical structures and ecological living have become...
in the pre-gentrified
Gentrification
Gentrification and urban gentrification refer to the changes that result when wealthier people acquire or rent property in low income and working class communities. Urban gentrification is associated with movement. Consequent to gentrification, the average income increases and average family size...
Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill
Boerum Hill
Boerum Hill is a small neighborhood in the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn that occupies 36 blocks bounded by State Street to the north, 4th Avenue to the east, Smith Street to the west, and Warren Street to the south. Commercial strips line Smith Street and Atlantic...
). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his Bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
childhood as “thrilling” and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, saw Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
writer Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
. Lethem later said Dick’s work was “as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel.”
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor
Brain tumor
A brain tumor is an intracranial solid neoplasm, a tumor within the brain or the central spinal canal.Brain tumors include all tumors inside the cranium or in the central spinal canal...
, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
song Like a Rolling Stone
Like a Rolling Stone
"Like a Rolling Stone" is a 1965 song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Its confrontational lyrics originate in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England...
in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown
Complete Unknown
Complete Unknown is an unreleased Bob Dylan-themed documentary film that screened at film festivals in Canada and the U.K. in 2003 and 2004. It was co-directed by Canadian filmmakers Griffin Ondaatje and Craig Proctor and features their comically circuitous pilgrimages with cameraman Simon...
.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College
Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.-History:-Early years:...
in Vermont
Vermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an “overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor....at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege.” This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked
Hitchhiking
Hitchhiking is a means of transportation that is gained by asking people, usually strangers, for a ride in their automobile or other road vehicle to travel a distance that may either be short or long...
from Denver
Denver, Colorado
The City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...
, Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
to Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
in 1984, across “a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done." He lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing in his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.
First novels
Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional MusicGun, with Occasional Music
Gun, with Occasional Music is a 1994 novel by Jonathan Lethem. It blends science fiction and hardboiled detective fiction. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994.-Plot:...
, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
detective story, which includes talking kangaroo
Kangaroo
A kangaroo is a marsupial from the family Macropodidae . In common use the term is used to describe the largest species from this family, especially those of the genus Macropus, Red Kangaroo, Antilopine Kangaroo, Eastern Grey Kangaroo and Western Grey Kangaroo. Kangaroos are endemic to the country...
s, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd pictured my first novels being published as paperback originals,” he recalled, "and instead a prestigious house was doing the book in cloth....I was in heaven." The novel was released to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel," catapulted the book to wider commercial success. Gun, with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award
Nebula Award
The Nebula Award is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America , for the best science fiction/fantasy fiction published in the United States during the previous year...
, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine
Locus (magazine)
Locus, subtitled "The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field", is published monthly in Oakland, California. It reports on the science fiction and fantasy publishing field, including comprehensive listings of all new books published in the genre. It is considered the news organ and trade...
reader's poll. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula
Alan J. Pakula
Alan Jay Pakula was an American film director, writer and producer noted for his contributions to the conspiracy thriller genre.-Career:...
optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.
He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon
Amnesia Moon
Amnesia Moon is a 1995 novel by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem adapted the novel from several unpublished short stories he had written, all about catastrophic, apocalyptic events. In finished form Amnesia Moon bears homage to Philip K. Dick. In fact, during a party scene, one guest describes a battle of...
. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country, this second novel uses a road
Road trip
A road trip is any journey taken on roads, regardless of stops en route. Typically, road trips are long distances traveled by automobile.-Pre-automobile road trips:...
narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye is a 1996 collection of seven short stories by Jonathan Lethem. In 2002 a collection of the same name appeared in the UK that also contained seven stories, but two stories from the earlier collection—"Vanilla Dunk" and "Forever, Said the Duck"—were replaced...
), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table
As She Climbed Across the Table
As She Climbed Across the Table is a 1997 novel by the American writer Jonathan Lethem. This satirical science fiction story is set on the campus of fictional Beauchamp University in Northern California. Particle physicist Alice Coombs rooms with Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist researching...
, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.
In 1996, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape
Girl in Landscape
Girl in Landscape is a science fiction novel by Jonathan Lethem, originally published as a 280-page hardback in 1998, by Doubleday Publishing Group...
. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty
Puberty
Puberty is the process of physical changes by which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of reproduction, as initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads; the ovaries in a girl, the testes in a boy...
while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders. Girl in Landscapes plot and characters, including the figures of a young girl and a violently protective father figure, were "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne
John Wayne
Marion Mitchell Morrison , better known by his stage name John Wayne, was an American film actor, director and producer. He epitomized rugged masculinity and became an enduring American icon. He is famous for his distinctive calm voice, walk, and height...
Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
The Searchers
The Searchers (film)
The Searchers is a 1956 American Western film directed by John Ford, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, and set during the Texas–Indian Wars...
, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."
Mainstream success and "genre bending"
The first novel Lethem began after returning to New York City was Motherless BrooklynMotherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn is a Jonathan Lethem detective story set in Brooklyn and published in 1999. Lethem's protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome, a disorder marked by involuntary tics...
, a return to the detective theme, this time maintaining objective realism while exploring subjective alterity
Alterity
Alterity is a philosophical term meaning "otherness", strictly being in the sense of the other of two . In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and...
through Lionel Essrog. His protagonist has Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical tics and at least one vocal tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane...
and is obsessed with language. Lethem later said that Essrog "obviously [is] the character I’ve written with whom I most identify," and explained that the novel "stands outside myself .... It’s the only one that doesn’t need me, never did. It would have found someone to write it, by necessity." Upon its publication in 1999, Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger
Gold Dagger
The Gold Dagger Award was an award given annually by the Crime Writers' Association for the best crime novel of the year.For its first five years, the organization's top honor was known as the Crossed Red Herring Award....
for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
. In 1999, Edward Norton
Edward Norton
Edward Harrison Norton is an American actor, screenwriter, film director and producer. In 1996, his supporting role in the courtroom drama Primal Fear garnered him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor...
announced that he was planning to write, direct and star in a film adaptation of the novel. In March 2007, Norton said he was still working on the screenplay.
According to The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster
Hipster (contemporary subculture)
Hipsters are a subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with musical interests mainly in alternative rock that appeared in the 1990s...
celebrity," and he was referred to several times as a "genre
Genre fiction
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....
bender." Critics cited the variety of Lethem's novels, which were alternately hardboiled detective fiction, science fiction, and autobiographical. (Lethem credited his comfort in genre-mixing to his father's art, which "always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously.") In Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp , Codex , The Magicians and The Magician King...
classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon born May 24, 1963) is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation", according to The Virginia Quarterly Review....
(with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...
, and Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke
Susanna Mary Clarke is a British author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , a Hugo Award-winning alternate history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time...
.
In 2003, Lethem responded to the issue of "genre bending":
The fact is, I used to get very involved, six or seven years ago, and before that, in questions of taxonomy of genre, and in the idea—which is ultimately a political idea—that a given writer, perhaps me, could in some objective way alter or reorganize the boundaries between genres .... Nowadays, I've come to feel that talking about categories, about 'high' and 'low', about genre and their boundaries and the blurring of those boundaries, all consists only of an elaborate way to avoid actually discussing what moves and interests me about books—my own, and others'. What I like are books in their homely actuality—the insides of the books, the mysterious movements of characters and situations and the emotions that accompany those movements. The play of sentences, their infinite variety.
In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000). This Shape We're In was one of the first offerings from McSweeney's
McSweeney's
McSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...
Books, the publishing imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...
that developed from Dave Eggers'
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.-Life:Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts,...
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is a literary journal, first published in 1998, edited by Dave Eggers. The first issue featured only works rejected by other magazines, but thereafter the journal began to include pieces written with McSweeney's in mind. McSweeney’s has since published works by...
.
In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big, sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003, as The Fortress of Solitude
The Fortress of Solitude (novel)
The Fortress of Solitude is a 2003 semi-autobiographical novel by Jonathan Lethem set in Brooklyn and spanning the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It follows two teenage friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, one white and one black, who discover a magic ring...
. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
features dozens of characters in a variety of milieus, but features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
during the late 1970s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill
Boerum Hill
Boerum Hill is a small neighborhood in the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn that occupies 36 blocks bounded by State Street to the north, 4th Avenue to the east, Smith Street to the west, and Warren Street to the south. Commercial strips line Smith Street and Atlantic...
. It was named one of nine "Editor's Choice" books of the year by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
and has been published in fifteen languages.
Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In March 2005, The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was released. On September 20, 2005, Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship.
2005 - present
In September 2006, Lethem wrote the article, "The Genius of Bob Dylan", a lengthy interview with Bob Dylan, which was published in Rolling StoneRolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine; the interview contained Lethem's reflections on Dylan's artistic achievements, and revealed Dylan's dissatisfaction with contemporary recording techniques and his thoughts on his own status.
After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided that "[i]t was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway …. I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." In 2007, he returned as a novelist to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, where some of his earlier fiction had been set, with You Don't Love Me Yet
You Don't Love Me Yet
You Don't Love Me Yet is a comic novel about alternative music from Jonathan Lethem, set in modern Los Angeles.-Plot summary:Lucinda Hoekke is an underemployed woman in her late twenties, playing bass in a fledgling Los Angeles rock group...
, a novel about an upstart rock band. The novel revolves around a woman in the band, Lucinda, who answers phones for her friend's complaint line and uses some of a caller's words as lyrics. According to Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet was inspired by the years he spent as the lead singer in an upstart California band in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what he called "the unformed posturing phase of life." The novel received mixed reviews.
In 2005, Lethem had announced that he was planning to revive the Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
character Omega the Unknown
Omega The Unknown
Omega the Unknown was an American comic book published by Marvel Comics from 1976 to 1977, featuring the eponymous fictional character. The series, written by Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes and illustrated by Jim Mooney, ran for 10 issues before cancellation for low sales...
in a ten-issue series to be published in 2006. After hearing of the project, Omega co-creator Steve Gerber
Steve Gerber
Stephen Ross "Steve" Gerber was an American comic book writer best known as co-creator of the satiric Marvel Comics character Howard the Duck....
expressed personal outrage over the use of the character without his participation, though he later discussed the project with Lethem and admitted that he had "misjudged" him. In May, 2006, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada
Joe Quesada
Joseph "Joe" Quesada is an American comic book editor, writer and artist. He became known in the 1990s for his work on various Valiant Comics books, such as Ninjak and Solar, Man of the Atom...
explained that the series had been delayed to 2007, saying that "winning the Macarthur Grant put additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem's] time." The revamped Omega the Unknown series was published in ten monthly issues from October, 2007 to July, 2008; the issues were published in a single volume in October, 2008.
In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City
Chronic City
-Summary:Lethem began work on Chronic City in early 2007, and has said that the novel is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K...
, which was published on October 13, 2009. In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, between Central Park and the East River. The Upper East Side lies within an area bounded by 59th Street to 96th Street, and the East River to Fifth Avenue-Central Park...
of Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
, Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
, Charles G. Finney
Charles G. Finney
Charles G. Finney was an American fantasy novelist and newspaperman. His full name was Charles Grandison Finney, evidently in honor of his great-grandfather, famous evangelist Charles Grandison Finney.-Biography:...
and Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
’s Vertigo
Vertigo (film)
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A...
and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange."
His essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (2007) is a passionate defense of plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and a call for a return to a gift economy
Gift economy
In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
in the arts. He writes "The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism" and "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you." The essay was included in his 2011 collection, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
In 2011, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Lethem, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Among other projects Lethem is currently working on short books about John Carpenter's
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
movie They Live
They Live
They Live is a 1988 science fiction/horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Frank Armitage ....
(published in October, 2010 as They Live) and the album Fear of Music
Fear of Music (album)
Fear of Music is the third studio album by American New Wave band Talking Heads, released on 3 August 1979 on Sire Records. It was recorded at locations in New York City between April and May 1979 and was produced by the quartet and Brian Eno. The album entered the Billboard 200 in the United...
by Talking Heads
Talking Heads
Talking Heads were an American New Wave and avant-garde band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991. The band comprised David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison...
. Starting in 2011, he served as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College
Pomona College
Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.The founding member...
, the position formerly held by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
.
Personal life
In 1987, Lethem married the writer and artist Shelley JacksonShelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her groundbreaking work of hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl...
; they were divorced by 1997. In 2000, he married Julia Rosenberg, a Canadian film executive; they divorced two years later.
Lethem lives in Brooklyn and Berwick, Maine
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
, with his third wife, filmmaker Amy Barrett, and their son, Everett Barrett Lethem (b. May 23, 2007).
Works
Novels- Gun, with Occasional MusicGun, with Occasional MusicGun, with Occasional Music is a 1994 novel by Jonathan Lethem. It blends science fiction and hardboiled detective fiction. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994.-Plot:...
(1994) - Amnesia MoonAmnesia MoonAmnesia Moon is a 1995 novel by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem adapted the novel from several unpublished short stories he had written, all about catastrophic, apocalyptic events. In finished form Amnesia Moon bears homage to Philip K. Dick. In fact, during a party scene, one guest describes a battle of...
(1995) - As She Climbed Across the TableAs She Climbed Across the TableAs She Climbed Across the Table is a 1997 novel by the American writer Jonathan Lethem. This satirical science fiction story is set on the campus of fictional Beauchamp University in Northern California. Particle physicist Alice Coombs rooms with Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist researching...
(1997) - Girl in LandscapeGirl in LandscapeGirl in Landscape is a science fiction novel by Jonathan Lethem, originally published as a 280-page hardback in 1998, by Doubleday Publishing Group...
(1998) - Motherless BrooklynMotherless BrooklynMotherless Brooklyn is a Jonathan Lethem detective story set in Brooklyn and published in 1999. Lethem's protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome, a disorder marked by involuntary tics...
(1999) - The Fortress of SolitudeThe Fortress of Solitude (novel)The Fortress of Solitude is a 2003 semi-autobiographical novel by Jonathan Lethem set in Brooklyn and spanning the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It follows two teenage friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, one white and one black, who discover a magic ring...
(2003) - Believeniks!: 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets with Christopher SorrentinoChristopher SorrentinoChristopher Sorrentino is an American novelist and short story writer of Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz...
, as "Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin" (2006) - You Don't Love Me YetYou Don't Love Me YetYou Don't Love Me Yet is a comic novel about alternative music from Jonathan Lethem, set in modern Los Angeles.-Plot summary:Lucinda Hoekke is an underemployed woman in her late twenties, playing bass in a fledgling Los Angeles rock group...
(2007) - Chronic CityChronic City-Summary:Lethem began work on Chronic City in early 2007, and has said that the novel is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K...
(2009)
Novellas
- This Shape We're In (2000)
Short story collections
- The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the EyeThe Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the EyeThe Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye is a 1996 collection of seven short stories by Jonathan Lethem. In 2002 a collection of the same name appeared in the UK that also contained seven stories, but two stories from the earlier collection—"Vanilla Dunk" and "Forever, Said the Duck"—were replaced...
(1996) - Kafka AmericanaKafka AmericanaKafka Americana is a 1999 collection of short stories by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz based on the life and works of Franz Kafka. Originally published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press, it was released as a trade paperback by W. W...
(1999) (with Carter ScholzCarter ScholzCarter Scholz is a speculative fiction author and composer of music. He has published several works of short fiction and two novels . He has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette...
) - Men and Cartoons (2004)
- How We Got Insipid (2006)
Non-fiction
- The Disappointment Artist (2005)
- They Live (2010)
- The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (2011)
- The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2011, co-editor with Pamela Jackson)
- Talking Heads' Fear Of Music (forthcoming, 2012)
Comics
- Omega the Unknown (2007)
Films
- Light and the SuffererLight and the SuffererLight and the Sufferer is an American science-fiction film starring Paul Dano, Paz de la Huerta, Michael Esper, Paul D'Amato and directed by Christopher Peditto...
(2009) – screenplay by Christopher Peditto based on a short story by Lethem
Miscellaneous
- "Monstrous Acts and Little Murders" (Salon.comSalon.comSalon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
essay, January 1997) - The Vintage Book of Amnesia (editor, 2001)
- Da Capo Best Music Writing: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country and More (editor, 2002)
- "You Don't Know Dick" (BookforumBookforumBookforum is a New York-based magazine devoted to books and the discussion of literature. It is edited by Albert Mobilio, Chris Lehmann, , and Michael Miller.-History: Bookforum was launched in 1994 as a literary supplement to Artforum...
essay, Summer 2002) - The Subway Chronicles (contributor, 2006)
- Brooklyn Was Mine (contributor, 2008)
- "Being James Brown" (Rolling StoneRolling StoneRolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
essay, June 2006) - "The Genius of Bob Dylan" (Rolling StoneRolling StoneRolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
interview, September 2006) - "The Ecstasy of Influence" (Harper's MagazineHarper's MagazineHarper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
essay, February 2007) - "Ava's Apartment" (The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
short story, May 2009) - "Procedure in Plain Air" (The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
short story, October 2009)