A rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds. 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 fiction. 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 gathers a lifetime of Lethem's art-writing, along with stunning, full-color images from the author's own collection and elsewhere. Here we tour Lethem's fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends; his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. More than just a compilation, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of Jonathan Lethem's parallel life in visual culture - a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds, and an essential, singular brick to add to your own collection.
Industry 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
