Overview

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, “made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts” before diverting, at nineteen, to prose. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates—and mourns—this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book. Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture mortars together Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends with dozens of original essays ranging from comics and graffiti art, to his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, to his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. Unique in Lethem’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture. Gorgeously designed, with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere, Cellophane Bricks is a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds.

Full Product Details

9798988670001

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. --Austin American-Statesman ""A writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture."" --USA Today ""A writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them with unapologetic enthusiasm."" --The Telegraph ""He remains . . . a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction."" --Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic ""I love and admire the way Lethem's always pushing at the edges of the form. He's so in command of the material, both of the subject and the language, that it sometimes feels as if he's improvising on it, or even floating free of it completely, the way a jazz musician might. His wonderfully corrosive humor is underpinned by a strange, mixed sense of outrage and tenderness."" --Rupert Thomson, author of The Book of Revelation and Dartmouth Park ""Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist."" --Boston Globe ""Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination."" --Los Angeles Times Book Review ""Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America."" --Dana Spiotta ""One of his generation's finest writers."" --The Maine Edge ""The expected and welcome pleasures of reading Lethem: his intellect, dialogue and wry humor . . . so much of his work [is] inventive, entertaining and superbly written."" --New York Times Book Review ""The quality of Lethem's prose and the exuberance of his imagination are reasons enough to read [him] . . . When it comes to style, Lethem has few equals."" --Miami Herald"

Author Information

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and twelve other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in five volumes, and his work translated into over thirty languages. He has been recipient of The National Book Critics Circle Award, The World Fantasy Award, The Berlin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at Pomona College.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available