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 ReviewLethem’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 addition
to his books, Lethem is also an inventive and inexhaustible writer of short
stories, comics, and essays. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker,
Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Granta,
McSweeney’s as well as variety of other periodicals and anthologies. 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 has been 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.
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 and performs with the musical group
I’m Not Jim.
Bio adapted courtesy of The MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org).
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.