What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In 'The Ecstasy of Influence', Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the 'white elephant' role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.
What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In 'The Ecstasy of Influenc...
The hero of this novel is one Lionel Essrog, otherwise known as the Human Freakshow. Essrog is a victim of Tourette's Syndrome; hapless and veering out of control, he fights himself and his disease.
The hero of this novel is one Lionel Essrog, otherwise known as the Human Freakshow. Essrog is a victim of Tourette's Syndrome; hapless and veering ou...
It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music"; - and everything spins outward from that one moment. Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music; (the third album by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics,...
It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) annou...
Clint Eastwood has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer and composer. These newly discovered conversations with legendary journalist Paul Nelson return us to a point when, still acting in other people's films, Eastwood was honing his directorial craft on a series of inexpensive films that he brought in under budget and ahead of schedule. Operating largely beneath the critical radar, he made his movies swiftly and inexpensively. Few of his critics then could have predicted that Eastwood the actor and director would ever be taken as seriously as he is today. But...
Clint Eastwood has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer and composer. These newly discovered conversations with legendary...
A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American 20th century, 'Dissident Gardens' is the story of a group of individuals who fought and lost, but might one day win. It is a blast of pure style and literary dazzle from one of the great and most innovative writers of the age.
A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American 20th century, 'Dissident Gardens' is the story of a group of individuals who fought and...
In this supplement to Jonathan Lethem's novel A Gambler's Anatomy, the renowned novelist engages in a concerted transatlantic dialogue with cult theorist Laurence A. Rickels, exploring the vicissitudes of popular culture and the profound influence of Philip K. Dick on their respective lines of flight. Foregrounding the introjections between California and Germany, they address a range of ideas, subjects and figures, from B-movies, science fiction, Wile E. Coyote and the Devil to trauma theory, Freud, Hitchcock and German Expressionism. Animating their zone of interrogation is the...
In this supplement to Jonathan Lethem's novel A Gambler's Anatomy, the renowned novelist engages in a concerted transatlantic dialogue wit...
The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - stops working... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher...
The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, c...
