Jonathan Lethem
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Articles by Jonathan Lethem
This bird’s a doofus
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Second Chances | Jonathan Lethem
My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A visit to one of his shops often concluded with taking home a novel one had not only not been seeking, but of which one had never heard.
Stop Making Sense
The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone. Thoughts that first ran through my head, all garbage now, like scorched paperwork over the harbor: Wow, it’s going to be hard to repair those tall buildings! Couldn’t Clinton just be president again? I mean, really, that whole election thing was fun, but the real guy is alive, he’s healthy, can’t we just sort of slip him in there? One of those buildings couldn’t actually fall, could it? Could it?
Get Me Out of Here: Harry Dean Stanton in Straight Time
Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for that first hour in which he doesn’t appear; quite the opposite. Jerry, a former robber gone straight, has tucked himself deep in a hiding place, a suburban life nearly as anonymized as the witness protection program.
Ma Bell's - The Pickup
Published in 2013 by This Land Press, edited by Jeff Martin, and lauded by The Paris Review as “the literary equivalent of a high-wire act,” Imaginary Oklahoma is a collection of flash fiction stories about Oklahoma by writers who may or may not have ever been here.
Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan
This is a series of blog posts by Jonathan Lethem about the 2026 NBA finals. Check back after each game for new entries. Game 4 Game 3 Game 2 Game 1 Game Zero Maxim report: the Knicks won the third quarter of the basketball game, by twelve points. Of course, because of their truly atrocious play in the first half and the crushing dominance of the Spurs’ efforts, that still left the Knicks in a fifteen-point hole.
James S. A. Corey: The Faith of Beasts, Kartoniert / Broschiert
**TheSunday Times bestselling series** 'TRULY EPIC' Fonda Lee on The Mercy of Gods 'DAZZLING . . . THIS IS SPACE OPERA AT ITS BEST' Publishers Weekly on The Mercy of Gods From the multi-million-copy bestselling author of the Expanse comes the second book in the Captive's War series - a spectacular new space opera that sees humanity fighting for its survival in a war as old as the universe itself. The monstrous Carryx empire was built by subjugation and war.
Motherless Brooklyn (2019) - Film
Lionel Essrog adalah seorang detektif swasta di New York yang hidup dengan sindrom Tourette, membuatnya sering kesulitan mengendalikan ucapan dan perilakunya. Meski begitu, ia sangat cerdas dan setia, terutama kepada mentornya, Frank Minna, yang telah memberinya pekerjaan sekaligus arah hidup. Ketika Frank tewas secara misterius, Lionel merasa kehilangan besar dan memutuskan untuk menyelidiki kasus tersebut sendirian.
Jonathan Lethem’s A Different Kind of Tension
Jonathan Lethem’s worlds are broken, its characters lost in the fray. His fiction rarely offers a stable center; instead, it hums with spectacular misfires, short circuits, and metaphysical breakdowns. This fractured world is sharply revealed in Lethem’s “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock at the Door,” a story from 2002 that’s been collected in A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories.
Book Excerpt Special: Jonathan Lethem's 'Program's Progress' — Streetsblog USA
Graphic: Ecco Class struggle. Infirm secondary superheroes. Suicidal sheep. And sex that literally knocks you into a different time zone. It’s all in Jonathan Lethem's new collection of short stories, "A Different Kind of Tension" (Ecco). But why would we, at Streetsblog, care about a writer who has bent literary genres for three-plus decades as he's bounded between California and Brooklyn with nary a thought for the car culture against which we rage daily?
Book Excerpt Special: Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Program’s Progress’
Welcome to EcoTopical Your daily eco-friendly green news aggregator. Leaf through planet Earths environmental headlines in one convenient place. Read, share and discover the latest on ecology, science and green living from the web's most popular sites.
Art Fugues
Venusian Mirror (For Pui Tiffany Chow) “During this period there was another curious thing.” –Gertrude Stein, Picasso Women who look in the mirror. Men who look at women in the mirror. Women who sit or squat or crawl across the floor toward the mirror. Women who fly toward the mirror or women toward whom the mirror flies. Women who bathe. Women who paint. Women who crawl, climb, clamber or oscillate across the surface of the table or floor. Women in space.
Franz Kafka’s Best Friend
Books & the Arts / November 12, 2025 Man’s Best Friend Franz Kafka’s Best Friend Kafka’s late story about a philosopher dog, like most of his stories about animals, is really about our lost humanity. Ad Policy Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. This article appears in the December 2025 issue, with the headline “Man’s Best Friend.” Slavoj Žižek had me at the title of his 1992 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock).
Frantic Realism | Jonathan Lethem
Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland features a distinctive running joke in which titles of Hollywood films are marked with the years of their release: “They were talking about Return of the Jedi (1983), parts of which had been filmed in the area.” This holds even when a title is mentioned in dialogue, by a character who can hardly be expected to have cared to cite the year of a given film’s release, or even to know it: “Let me guess—2001: A Space Odyssey [1968].” “Try 20,000 Years in Sing...
Jonathan Lethem on Revisiting Old Short Stories While Writing New Ones
Jonathan Lethem appears steadily in the contemporary literary livestream, He’s earned the title “bard of Brooklyn” for fiction about his native borough.
A Different Kind of Tension
Hi Medium friends. It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been working on a novel and on directing a film, I’ve curated a museum exhibition, and I’ve even played bass on an album. More about all of this eventually. What I’m doing next is talking about this new book, which is published in September. It’s different from any book I’ve written, since it covers my whole creative life. The earliest stories were written in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.
The Surrealist Fiction of Dino Buzzati
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. A Master of Surrealist Fiction and a Bard for Anxious Times Dino Buzzati’s best works evoke the fabulism, paranoia and allegory of writers like Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Italo Calvino.
The Big Heat: Fate’s Network
It starts with a gun, a hand, a staircase, a clock. A woman descends the stairs at the sound of a shot. A policeman, we are soon to learn, has committed suicide, but the behavior of his fresh-minted widow is coolly utilitarian. She conceals his suicide note, and telephones criminals, rather than police; her call results in further calls, by criminals, to further criminals. The telephone in The Big Heat (1953) will be more than a conveyor of bad news, though it is always that.
Brooklyn Crime Novel, di Jonathan Lethem: un noir che è anche un viaggio
Jonathan Allen Lethem (New York, 19 febbraio 1964), nasce a Brooklyn, primo di tre figli di Richard Brown Lethem, un pittore d’avanguardia statunitense. L’autore è apprezzato e conosciuto per il suo stile letterario, dove convivono una grande varietà di generi e registri. Se si conosce questo di Jonathan Lethem, allora non ci sarà sconcerto e meraviglia di fronte ai primi capitoli del suo ultimo romanzo, “Brooklyn Crime Novel”.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship. An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it. Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day.
Jonathan Lethem's Object of Desire
Can treasure also be heavily used? The most functional piece of art I took for granted the longest was our ashtray, which provided routine and filthy service. It is made of pewter and depicts the biblical story Jonah and the Whale.
The Forty-Fourth Year of the Reagan Administration | Jonathan Lethem
To start, I’ll put aside Palestine. In 2013, among a group of friends in an online forum, contemplating the souring hopes of the late Obama years and wondering what might come after—that is to say, with Trump/Sanders populism still beyond credible prediction—Lucy Sante wrote to us: On wealth and its distribution, however, which is the issue that matters to me more than all others combined, we are currently in the 33rd year of the Reagan administration.
With Adam Curtis in London
Anyone want to join? There are still seats, I hear.
Collapsing Frontier, The, By Jonathan Lethem, 176 pgs.
Sep 19, 2024 PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series is one of the most unique and fun things going on in the publishing world currently. The concept is straightforward: find interesting, thought-provoking, boundary-pushing writers from across the literary and political landscape, and publish their shortform work in a pocket-sized edition.
So Many Personal Essays to Delve Into this Week...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Becoming Becks” by .
When Art Talks Back: Jonathan Lethem on Graffiti As Visual and Written Expression
In Lucy Ives’s new novel, Life is Everywhere, she writes: “Everyone who has ever lived was born into something that was already taking place.” Article continues after advertisement As children in New York City in the 1970s, we were born into a world covered with paint. Walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corner blurred into globs, approximate shapes.
Did the Early 1990s Break American Politics?
The Nation Weekly Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here. As concerned as he is with describing the conditions that produced these demagogues, Ganz is equally deft in characterizing their individual personalities.
How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music
Edited by Alison Fensterstock. HarperOne, $40 (352p) ISBN 978-0-06-327033-6 Fensterstock, a contributor to NPR’s Turning the Tables, a “multiplatform series” that celebrates the women who shaped American popular music, draws from it and more than 50 years of the station’s coverage in a rich and resonant collection of essays, interview excerpts, and ephemera.
Telltale Hearts: A Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story
Dean-David Schillinger. PublicAffairs, $32 (352p) ISBN 978-1-5417-0420-6 San Francisco General Hospital physician Schillinger argues for the importance of listening closely to medical patients while highlighting the inequalities that plague the American healthcare system in this impassioned memoir. “The combination of science and stories holds the key to recovery,” Schillinger begins, decrying medicine’s tendency to “devalue stories” in favor of formulaic treatment.
The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism
Joe Conason. St. Martin’s, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-62116-0 The scams and lies that characterize today’s Republican party are “less a comic distraction than a central feature,” one endemic to the past several decades of the party’s history, according to this well-researched and rambunctious account.
Roman Year: A Memoir
André Aciman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-0-374-61338-9 In this richly layered account, Call Me by Your Name author Aciman recalls the loneliness and beauty of coming of age while his family was exiled in Rome. Against a backdrop of rising antisemitism in Egypt (covered in Aciman’s previous memoir, Out of Egypt), the author’s once-prosperous Jewish family fled from their Alexandria mansion in the mid-1960s with only the possessions they could fit in their suitcases.
Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win
Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win Valenti (Sex Objects) draws on her post-Roe-era newsletter Abortion, Every Day—where she has been “tracking every ban, court case, and anti-abortion strategy” in the U.S.—to create this clarifying and incandescent affirmation of not only the importance of abortion rights but their status as a winning issue at the ballot box.
A Little Queer Natural History
Josh L. Davis. Univ. of Chicago, $16 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-226-83703-1 This splendid debut from Davis, a science writer for London’s Natural History Museum, surveys the dazzling variety of sexual behavior and expression in the animal, fungi, and plant kingdoms.
Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past
Steve Benen. Mariner, $32.50 (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-339367-7 The Republican Party is waging a “frantic gaslighting campaign” to “rewrite the stories that have unfolded over the last several years,” according to this illuminating account from Benen (The Impostors), a producer of The Rachel Maddow Show.
The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies
Deborah Levy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (176p) ISBN 978-0-374-61497-3 Novelist and playwright Levy (August Blue) delivers a dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more. The stylish essays—some as brief as one page—run the gamut from funny reflections on the Mona Lisa (“Her hair looks uncared for under her hood.
The New Yorker Daily Newsletter
In today’s edition, exclusively for newsletter readers, as “Twisters” hits theatres, Richard Brody shares a few of his favorite disaster movies, which feature floods, fires, cracks in the earth, and more. Plus: • Searching for meaning in an assassination attempt • The truth inside Julio Torres’s “Fantasmas” • The brilliance of Bob Newhart As the Republican Convention anoints the ex-President, the Democratic panic over Joe Biden begins to look like a coup.
Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture
Jonathan Lethem. ZE, $40 (416p) ISBN 979-8-9886700-0-1 Novelist Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel)shares an entrancing collection of stories and essays celebrating visual art.
Cross-Country Tripping | Jonathan Lethem, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
“Charles Portis is anomalous,” Jonathan Lethem writes in our June 20 issue; he is “force-fielded in a durable glamour of obscurity and frequently championed for revival—‘America’s most remembered forgotten novelist,’ as the writer Mark Dunbar quipped.” On the occasion of a new Library of America edition of Portis’s work, Lethem explores the full career of this brilliant, hilarious, yet self-effacing and often overlooked novelist, from his slim debut, Norwood (1966), through his most...
Summer 2024 - Filmmaker Magazine
Internal Lives: Annie Baker on Janet Planet For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to...
Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with
Click here to read our summer 2024 issue, featuring Jonathan Lethem in conversation with Between the Temples's Nathan Silver, Daniel Garber on how true crime series are edited and more...
Hitchhiking Is Illegal in Nevada
June 26, 2024 hitchhiking is illegal in Nevada ellisia/Adobe Stock This story was originally published in the July 6, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone. I’ll ask you to picture me as a black dot in the desert, a period crawling across a straight line drawn on a vast white page, sweating literally and metaphorically, regretting everything, at ground zero in midsummer 1984. I’ll ask you to picture this: The highway patrol on Interstate 80 outside of Wendover, Nevada, sun of noon.
Hitchhiking Is Illegal in Nevada
Lifestyle 2 hours ago The Unexpected Sleeping Adjustment Tourists Visiting Germany May Need To Make explore.com - Shelly Abramovich • 2h Imagine it's evening and you've just arrived in Germany after a long transatlantic flight, ready to kick off your European adventure. You've … Airbnb 1 hour ago App Deleted: Why I Will Never Use AirBnB Again traveloffpath.com - Kashlee Kucheran • 1h AirBnB is not for me.
Museum Pieces, by Jonathan Lethem
From Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, which was published last month by ZE Books. The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the domain of my semi-feral childhood as the Automats and the soda counters and the used-book stores and Washington Square Park. I grew up going to the Museum of Natural History every year—it was a pro forma class trip for a public school kid, even one from Brooklyn.
Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison
Seth Rogovoy. Oxford Univ, , $25 ISBN 978-0-19-762782-2 Rogovoy (Bob Dylan), a contributing editor for the Forward, presents a boisterous celebration of George Harrison, “the quiet, serious, and spiritual” Beatle whose contributions were sometimes overlooked (Frank Sinatra covered Harrison’s “Something” for years, referring to it as his “favorite Lennon and McCartney song”).
Stroszek & Norwood
Here's the extra: "Norwood is slippery, even by the standards of Portis's later work. Though in content it might seem the least adventurous of the books, its incongruities and elisions make it nearly avant-garde. It has a weird twin, in fact, in Werner Herzog's film Stroszek, from 1977. Both tales feature an idiot-savant musician set on a surreal journey in a bizarre American landscape.
Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose | Jonathan Lethem
The comedian George Carlin had a routine, in the 1970s, in which he offered up a series of fake headlines in a blustery newscaster’s voice. “A man has barricaded himself inside of his house,” one opens. After a beat: “However, he is not armed, and no one is paying any attention to him.” I always think of that line whenever a famous novelist is praised for their reluctance to appear—for a refusal to give interviews, participate in public forums, be photographed for dust jackets, and so forth.
A History of New York Through Some of NYC’s Best Restaurants
Stork Club in 1961. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Go to any city in America and you can likely find a good Italian place, the hot Korean spot, and a semi-secret sushi counter. It’s only in New York that we have the rap-mogul restaurant, the supermodel café, the indie-director diner, and the club kids’ breakfast nook. We go to restaurants for oxtail or cocktails, but we also go to find our people.
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