J O N A T H A N L E T H E M .
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Biography
Jonathan Lethem was the founding fiction editor of Fence. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Books
The Disappointment Artist (Doubleday, March 2005)
Introduction, The Man Who Lost the Sea: Volume X: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, January 2005)
Men and Cartoons: Stories (Doubleday, November 2004)
Introduction, A New Life by Bernard Malamud (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, September 2004)
Contributor, Lit Riffs (MTV, June 2004)
Introduction, It Happened in Boston? by Russell H. Greenan (Modern Library, 2003)
The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003)
Introduction, Meeting Evil: A Novel by Thomas Berger (Simon & Schuster, May 2003)
Introduction, Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (Modern Library, April 2003)
The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, editor (DaCapo Press, 2002)
Editor, with Paul Bresnick, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country and More (Da Capo Press, October 2002)
Intoduction, On the Yard by Malcom Braly (New York Review of Books; reprint edition, January 2002)
Kafka Americana (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)
Introduction, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton (Modern Library, October 2001)
Kafka Americana, with Carter Scholz (W.W. Norton and Company, September 2001)
Introduction, Poor George: A Novel by Paula Fox (W.W. Norton and Company, February 2001)
This Shape We're In (McSweeney's, 2001)
Contributor, Nebula Awards Showcase 2000: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy Chosen by the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers (Harcourt, 2000)
The Vintage Book of Amnesia, editor (Vintage, 2000)
Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday, 1999)
Girl in Landscape (Doubleday, 1998)
As She Climbed Across the Table (Doubleday, 1997)
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (Harcourt, 1996)
Amnesia Moon (Harcourt, 1995)
Gun, with Occasional Music (Harcourt, 1994)
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Awards
American Library Notable Books 2000, Motherless Brooklyn
National Book Critics Circle Award, 1999, Motherless Brooklyn
Salon Book Award and Esquire's Novel of the Year, 1999, Motherless Brooklyn
World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, 1997, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
New York Times Notable Book, 1999, Motherless Brooklyn
Locus Award, Best First Novel, 1995, Gun, with Occasional Music
Crawford Fantasy Award, 1995, Gun, with Occasional Music
Finalist for the Nebula Award, 1995, Gun, with Occasional Music
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Press and Interviews
November 2003
The New Yorker
Interview: Out of Brooklyn
By Matt Dellinger
"There's something about pining for this place that's very important. I have to keep coming back and refreshing my sense of it, but I also have to always be pulling away, and I think you can feel that tension in the book."
October 2003
The Nation
Book Review: The Fortress of Solitude
By Melanie Rehak
"'There were two worlds.' So begins Dylan Ebdus, the boy hero who grows up in the pages of The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem's rich, dizzying new novel of Brooklyn,
adolescence, comic books, crime..."
October 2003
The New York Times
Remains of the Day
By Tara Bahrampour
"In The Fortress of Solitude, the neighborhood's neglected houses, scraggly ailanthus trees and uneven slate sidewalks are talismans of a sort; intimate knowledge of these things helps Dylan and his friend Mingus Rude gain a foothold in a dangerous world."
September 2003
The New York Times
Review: The Fortress of Solitude.
By A.O. Scott
"The Fortress of Solitude is crowded beyond my powers of summary with
lessons, insights, facts, dates, song titles and minor characters."
September 2003
The New York Times
Untangling the Knots of a Brooklyn Boyhood
By Diane Cardwell
"On good days that's what I think the novel was born to depict, is this unsimplicity of reality. On bad days I think no novel could ever get you there. It's too much. It's just too much to say how much the world can change but still stay the same all at once."
September 2003
Book Magazine
Interview and Review: The Fortress of Solitude
Home Boy
By Jerome V. Kramer
"'I tried to make the social milieu almost documentary,' Lethem says, and every page is filled with specific details, from songs girls sing on the street to the way graffiti and hip-hop grew into the culture to the feel of a Spaldeen, a high-bouncing pink rubber ball used for street games of stoopball and stickball. "
2003
Men's Journal
Review: The Fortress of Solitude
Straight Outta Brooklyn
By Jonathan Miles
"After penning four head-scratchingly inventive novels, all with a sci-fi bent, Jonathan Lethem hit critical pay dirt with 1999's Motherless Brooklyn..."
2003
BookPage
Interview: A Mighty Fortress
"Five years in the writing, The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's 640-page 'spiritual autobiography,' finds the 39-year-old at the top of his game as he vividly re-creates the mixed blessing of growing up in Brooklyn during the '70s, '80s and '90s."
2003
Paris Review
Interview: The Man in the Back Row Has a Question: Crime, cont.
"All my research is bookish, unless it's involuntary. I've by now processed my most distinctive victimizations into one or another scene in my two Brooklyn novels, so I'm no longer free to retail those stories, even if I could remember them honestly anymore—shorn of embellishments."
2003
Fantastic Fiction
Michael Chabon Recommends
By Michael Chabon
"Lethem has done a number of things here, any one of which is impossible for any but the very finest novelists."
Newcity Chicago
Review: This Shape We're In
Eye Spy
By Margaret Wappler
"Lethem doesn't discern what the eye might mean or be, and it's that lack of pandering that makes this small work a success. The author shows us a world of which we can barely
conceive..."
May 2001
The Stranger
Interview and Review: The Shape We're In
By Ashley Gaulthier
"It's [meant] to be re-read. It's better on second reading rather than first. And this format gives it a chance to have that sort of life."
October 1999
The New York Times
What Makes Him Tic?
By Albert Mobilio
"Judging by the energetic catholicity of his literary appropriations—the hard-boiled novel, science fiction, westerns and the academic novel—Jonathan Lethem appears to be both a scholar and a wide-eyed fan of any and all genre fiction."
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Additional Links
www.fortressofsolitude-book.com
www.ic.sunysb.edu/Stu/dmyers
www.richardlethem.com
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Author Photo
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Photo by Sylvia Plachy
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