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
(Courtesy of Lyceum Agency)
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