Jonathan Lethem (b.1964,) fully Jonathan Allen Lethem, is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. He is best known for novels that blend genres like mystery, detective, and science fiction with a pop-cultural sensitivity.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lethem dropped out of Bennington College, hitchhiked to Denver, and then moved on to California. For years before publishing his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1995,) a sci-fi detective story starring talking kangaroos and a cryogenic prison.
Motherless Brooklyn (1999) was based on his adolescence, a memoir about a white kid called Dylan and a black kid called Mingus growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award and reached mainstream success. The Fortress of Solitude (2003) became a New York Times Best Seller.
Lethem’s other works include Amnesia Moon (1995,) Men and Cartoons (2004,) You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007,) and A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jonathan Lethem
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it’s a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
—Jonathan Lethem
Topics: Autobiography
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
John Updike American Author
Ernest J. Gaines American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Gene Wolfe American Science Fiction, Fantasy Writer
Raymond Chandler American Novelist
Jonathan Safran Foer American Novelist
Lloyd Alexander American Writer
Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
John Irving American Novelist