Jonathan Lethem

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Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

Gun, his first book published in 1994, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction.

Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book that achieved mainstream success in 1999.

He wrote The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller in 2003.

He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

Early life

Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was a non-Jew, with Scottish and English roots, and his mother was Jewish, and his mother was Jewish, from a German, Poland, and Russia family. Blake's brother is a musician who performed in the early New York hip hop scene, and his sister Mara is a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in the northern portion of Gowanus' northeast neighborhood (now called Boerum Hill). Lethem's fourth grade teacher at P.S. Carmen Faria, the future New York City Schools Chancellor, was born in Cobble Hill, who referred to him as the "perfect" teacher and to whom Occasional Music dedicated his first book, Gun. Despite the racial divides and conflicts, he later characterized his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of Bob Dylan's music, attended Star Wars twenty-one times during its initial theatrical debut, and read Philip K. Dick's complete works. Dick's work, according to Lethem later, was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock," a genre also responsible for bending it irreversibly along a route I still travel."

When Lethem was young, his parents divorced. Judith died of a malignant brain tumor when he was thirteen, an event that has haunted him and has largely influenced his writing. In the 2003 Canadian documentary "Complete Unknown," Lethem discusses the personal link between his mother and Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." "My books all have this huge, howling missing [center]—doutput: "Which has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has disappeared," Lethem said.

Lethem, who wanted to become a visual artist like his father, attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he described as "glib, show-offy, mainly cartoonish." He created The Literary Exchange, an art and writing zine, at Music & Art. He also made animated films and wrote a 125-page book, Heroes, which is also unpublished.

Lethem, who had graduated from high school, enrolled in Bennington College in Vermont as a prospective art student. Lethem was overwhelmed by Bennington's "overwhelming." ... confusion with the realities of education—my parents' bohemian milieu discouraged me from knowing, even a little, that we were poor. "All of Bennington was demolished by an encounter with the possibility of real wealth." Lethem's sophomore year was plagued by this realization that he was more interested in writing than art. In 1984, he rode from Denver, Colorado, to Berkeley, California, covering "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada," with about 40 dollars in my wallet, describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done."

Lethem spent ten years in California, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time. Lethem wrote his first short story in 1989 and several more in the early 1990s.

Personal life

Lethem married writer and artist Shelley Jackson in 1987, but by 1997, they had separated. Julia Rosenberg, a Canadian film executive, married him in 2000; they divorced two years later. Lethem and his third wife, artist Amy Barrett, lived in Brooklyn and Berwick, Maine, as of 2007. He has two sons.

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Career

Gun, Lethem's first book, with Occasional Music, is a mash-up of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking about kangaroos, experimental drug scenes, and cryogenic jails. Harcourt Brace's book was released in 1994 in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd imagined my first novels being published as paperback originals," he recalled, "but instead a wealthy house was putting the book in cloth." ... I was in heaven." The book's initial reception was minimal, but a scathing review in Newsweek, who declared Gun a "audaciously assured first book," spurred the book's wider commercial success. Gun with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award and first in the 1995 Locus Magazine readers' poll, placing first in the "Best First Novel" category. Alan J. Pakula, a film director, in the mid-1990s, selected the novel's film rights, allowing Lethem to stop working in bookstores and dedicate his time to writing.

Amnesia Moon (1995), his next book, was Amnesia Moon (1995). This second novel, partly inspired by Lethem's experience off-road, explores a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. Lethem's third book, As She Climbed Across the Table, appeared in 1996 as the beginning of many of his early stories, The Wall of the Eye, the Wall of the Eye. It begins with a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly named "Lack," for whom she spurns her former spouse. The majority of the story follows her ex-partner's comedic retaliation of this rejection, as well as the anomaly.

Lethem moved from San Francisco Bay to Brooklyn in 1996. Girl in Landscape was his next book, which came after his return to Brooklyn. A teenage girl must suffer puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens identified as Archbuilders in the book. Lethem said that Girl in Landscape's plot and characters, as well as the lives of a teenage girl and a fiercely protective father figure, were "very much influenced" by 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a film in which he is "obsessed."

Lethem, the first novel to debut in New York City, was Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme. Through Lionel Essrog, he maintained objective realism in the process of investigating subjective change. His protagonist has Tourette's syndrome and is obsessed with words.

Lethem later said that Essrog

Motherless Brooklyn received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award since its inception in 1999; Esquire named it book of the year. Edward Norton, a British actor, revealed in 1999 that he planned to write, direct, and star in a film adaptation of the novel. In 2019, Norton's film was released.

According to The New York Times, Motherless Brooklyn's fame made Lethem "something of a hipster celebrity," and he had been referred to multiple times as a "genre bender." Critics referred to Lethem's books, which were alternately hard-boiled detective fiction, science fiction, and autobiographical. Lethem attributed his success in genre mixing to his father's art, which "always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very obviously, very unself-consciously." Lev Grossman rated Lethem with a growing number of writers keen to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon (with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood, and Susanna Clarke.

Lethem wrote about "genre bending" in 2003:

Lethem began publishing a story collection, edited two anthologies, edited two anthologies, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000). This Shape We're In was one of McSweeney's first publications, the publishing imprint that resulted from Dave Eggers' Quarterly Concern.

Lethem said in November 2000 that he was working on an uncharacteristically "large" book about a child who dreams of being a rock journalist. The novel was released in 2003 as The Fortress of Solitude. Hundreds of characters appear in a variety of genres, but there is a tale of racial conflict and boyhood in Brooklyn in the late 1970s. The main characters in Boerum Hill are two people of different origins who grew up on the same block. The New York Times named it one of the year's top "Editor's Choice" books, and it has been released in fifteen languages.

Men and Cartoons, Lethem's second collection of short stories, was released in late 2004. The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was published in March 2005. Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship on September 20, 2005.

Lethem talked about short fiction in an Armchair/Shotgun interview in 2009.

Lethem wrote "The Genius of Bob Dylan," a long interview with Bob Dylan that was published in Rolling Stone in September 2006. Lethem's reflections on Dylan's artistic achievements were included in the interview. Dylan's dissatisfaction with modern recording technologies and his ideas about his own reputation were both revealed in the book.

Lethem figured that "[i]t was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway" after Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. I was really needed to defy all the stuff about place and memory." With You Don't Love Me Yet, a book about an upstart rock band, he returned as a novelist to California, where some of his earlier works were set. Lucinda, a woman in the band, answers phones for her friend's complaint line and uses some of a caller's words as lyrics. According to Lethem, the book was inspired by his years as the lead singer in a young California band in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what he referred to as "the uninformed posturing phase of life." The novel takes its title from two (otherwise unrelated) songs of Roky Erickson and The Vulgar Boatmen. Monster Eyes was the original name, but Lethem was persuaded by his publisher to change it. Even though the current title "isn't my word," he later revealed to an interviewer that the two songs "made it feel very lucky to me to have it on the book" and that, although the current title "isn't my word" for a book about appropriated words and how things can be repurposed, it looked good. It's also a wonderfully passive-aggressive title. The book has mixed reviews.

Lethem revealed in 2005 that he wanted to revive the Marvel Comics character Omega the Unknown in a ten-issue series to be published in 2006. After learning of the scheme, Omega co-creator Steve Gerber expressed personal displeasure with the character's use without his participation, but he later discussed the project with Lethem and confessed to having "misjudged" him. "Winning the MacArthur Grant brought additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem's] time," Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said in May 2006 that the series had been postponed to 2007. In ten monthly issues from October 2007 to July 2008, the revamped Omega the Unknown series was published in a single volume in October 2008.

Lethem began working on Chronic City in early 2007, which was published on October 13, 2009. Lethem said in July 2008 that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it's heavily influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney, and Hitchcock's Vertigo, affecting a circle of friends, including a former child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official." And it's long and strange."

His book, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," published in 2007, is a spirited defense of plagiarism and a call for a revival of the arts' "gift economy."

He writes,

The essay was included in his 2011 collection, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

By Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Lethem, was published in 2011. Lethem also published short books about John Carpenter's film They Live (released in October, 2010 as They Live) and the Talking Heads album Fear of Music. He started at Pomona College in 2011 as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing, a position that had previously been held by late David Foster Wallace.

Dissident Gardens, Lethem's ninth book, was published on September 10, 2013. The novel concerns "American leftists," particularly "a red-diaper baby generation trying to figure out what it all means, this American Communism legacy," Lethem said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Lethem said in a joint interview that the novel's setting is based on mythology.

Lucky Alan and Other Stories, Lethem's fifth short story collection, followed Dissident Gardens in February 2015.

Lethem's tenth book, A Gambler's Anatomy (or, alternatively, The Blot in the United Kingdom), was published in October 2016 and concerns "an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic." Lethem followed A Gambler's Anatomy/The Blot with The Feral Detective in November 2018, Lethem's first foray into the detective book genre after the acclaimed Motherless Brooklyn.

According to the publishers, Lethem's twelfth book, The Arrest - a "completely original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man who stood between them, and a nuclear-powered super car," was published in November 2020.

Lethem co-wrote six songs out of nine on Lee Ranaldo's album Electric Trim, which was released in 2017. Big Bang, David Bowman's 2019 book, was written by him.

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