Jonathan Lethem
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Lucky Lethem
On the other hand, hey, I’m 50. This is the third time I’ve gathered a decade’s stories. Let’s be clear about how much such introspection matters to the reader who’s either aboard or not aboard my “project” by now: likely,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Leave it to The Toast to give us a story told by a mermaid as opposed to a story about one. And leave it to The Toast to find a very good mermaid storyteller indeed. On Wednesday, they released “Mermaids at…
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Good Riddance to the Goodbye-to-New-York Essay
Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” has spawned a new literary genre: the personal screed about loving (or leaving) New York City.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #58: Crowdsourcing
Music-obsessive activity, in general, appears to be about music. You could, on the surface, mistake it for being about music. But in fact what it is about is memory and love.
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Margaret Atwood released Stone Mattress, a collection of “wonderfully weird short stories.” Stone Mattress is Atwood’s eighth collection of stories, not to mention her 14 novels and other formidable volumes of poetry, children’s literature, and nonfiction. Reviewers across the…
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Exercises in Style
Exercises in Style has been one of the most beloved books in the New Directions catalog since they first published it in 1981.
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The Ecstasy of Influence
In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem skips through culture—fine arts to music to literature to the personal and collective context of it all.
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On Criticism
At The Awl, Maria Bustillos breaks down the back-and-forth between Jonathan Lethem and James Wood over Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, interpreting both Wood’s original review and Lethem’s recent response. Ruminating on the possibility of improved communication between authors, readers,…
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A History of Plagiarism
What do Bob Dylan, Eli Wallach and Nabokov have in common? Artistic appropriation. And it’s not just those guys—but possibly all artists. Appropriation, recasting stories and lines into another form, is inherently a part of all art. Jonathan Lethem’s essay,…
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Notable New York, This Week 9/20 – 9/26
This week in New York Josh Neufeld gets graphic, How I Learned teaches us how to inhale, FDG Reading Series returns, Guillermo del Toro signs book two of three, Sam Lipsyte joins Brando Skyhorse, Arrested Development parties, and DUMBO Arts…
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Jonathan Lethem and David Gates Talk Facebook, Internet, The Future
“I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time e-mailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact—and I bet I’m not…
