Jonathan Lethem

Lethem giving the keynote address at the EMP Pop Conference, 2007.

Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American writer based in New York City, best known for his novels, short stories, and essays, whose work encompasses a variety of genres and styles.

Biography

Lethem was raised in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and lives there currently. His mother (an activist) and his father (the avant-garde painter Richard Brown Lethem) were Bohemians living in a pre-gentrified area of NYC during the 1970s. Lethem's mother died while he was a teen.

Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended The High School of Music & Art 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Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, that featured artwork and writing, and he wrote a 125 page unpublished novel, Heroes.

After high school he entered Vermont's Bennington College in Vermont in the early 1980s but soon dropped out. He then hitchhiked cross-country to California and settled there for a decade or so, working as a clerk in bookstores and writing in his own time. After managing to publish just a few short stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lethem broke into the literary scene in full force once his first novel was published. Gun, with Occasional Music was a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, complete with talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the illegal drug scene, and cryogenic containment cells. The novel 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.

Lethem put forth very different books at each successive turn. The 1995 novel Amnesia Moon explored a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape highly influenced by Philip K. Dick, a poly-dystopia 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 next novel, As She Climbed Across the Table was a love story set in motion when a physics researcher falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly. Her previous partner is spurned, and his comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly called "Lack," constitute the majority of the narrative. (Lethem's friend, novelist David Bowman, helped him name the novel, suggesting that Lethem -- who was having a hard time deciding on a title -- take the title from the last line of the novel: also the technique Thomas Pynchon used for The Crying of Lot 49. Bowman later dedicated his novel Bunny Modern to Lethem.)

In the late 1990s, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. Its plot bore similarities to the John Wayne 1950s movie classic The Searchers. A young girl is forced to endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

The first novel begun after he returned to New York City in 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, which takes on the detective theme once again, this time maintaining objective realism while exploring subjective alterity through a protagonist with Tourette syndrome. Edward Norton is adapting and planning to star in a film adaptation described as being "in production" as of 2006. [1] The novel won the National Book Critic's Circle Award, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire. It is generally regarded as Lethem's most endearing and irresistible novel.

Following the success of Motherless Brooklyn his UK publisher brought out new editions of his back catalogue. This included the first UK edition of Girl In Landscape and a revised version of The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye .

In the interval of four years during which he wrote his next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem also published story collections, edited volumes, wrote magazine pieces, and shepherded his 55-page novella This Shape We're In to an eventual niche as one of the first offerings from McSweeney's Books, the publishing imprint that arose from Dave Eggers's McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Lethem also married and divorced during this period, living briefly in Toronto in the process. In 2003 he finally published his semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, The Fortress of Solitude, a novel of encompassing ambition featuring dozens of characters in a variety of milieus -- but which centers on 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 eventually published in over fifteen languages. For many readers, this engaging, sprawling, uneven tome is Lethem's greatest testament to date.

His 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 also released.

In March, 2007, Lethem published You Don't Love Me Yet, a novel about a rock band in California, a return to the setting of much of his earlier fiction. This 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.

The polarity between California and New York, between the West Coast of Chandler and Dick and the East Coast of Lethem's childhood, black music, and graffiti, is one of the most important semantic axes in his oeuvre. Considering The Fortress of Solitude is a partly autobiographical novel, Lethem's Californian novels become an escape from his New York childhood, while the New York City diptych (Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude) is a return to the author's origin and past.

On September 20, 2005, he was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

He is currently working on a revival of Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics that has met with severe opposition by creators Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes.

In September 2006, Lethem published a lengthy interview with Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone magazine; the interview contained Lethem's reflections on Dylan's artistic achievements, as well as revealing Dylan's dissatisfaction with contemporary recording techniques and his thoughts on his own status.

Motherless Brooklyn inspired singer-songwriter Deb Talan's composition "Tell Your Story Walking", winner of the first Songs Inspired by Literature International Songwriting Competition, in 2002, and included on the album Songs Inspired by Literature (Chapter One), a benefit for Artists for Literacy.

Bibliography

Novels

• Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
• Amnesia Moon (1995)
• As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
• Girl in Landscape (1998)
• Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
• The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
• Believeniks!: 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets with Christopher Sorrentino, as by Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin (2006)
• You Don't Love Me Yet (2007)

Novellas

• This Shape We're In (2000)

Fiction collections

• The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996, US edition)
• Kafka Americana (1999) (with Carter Scholz)
• The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (2002, UK edition)
• Men and Cartoons: Stories (2004)
• How We Got Insipid (2006)

Non-fiction collections

• The Disappointment Artist (2005)

Miscellaneous

• The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2001) (Editor)
• Da Capo Best Music Writing: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country and More (2002) (Editor)
• The Subway Chronicles (2006) (Contributing Author)
• The Ecstasy of Influence (2007) (Essay in Feb. 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine)

External links

• Jonathan Lethem at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• Jonathan Lethem's MacArthur Fellowship biography page

• Jonathan Lethem interview

• Jonathan Lethem's personal website

• Author Interview on failbetter.com

• In-depth article on The Fortress of Brooklyn

• Roundtable with Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, John Darnielle, and Alec Hanley Bemis about the crossbreeding of music & literature (3/2006)

• Lethem interviews Bob Dylan

• http://www.artistsforliteracy.org

• http://www.debtalan.com