Jonathan Lethem
March 1–2, 2027
Bio
Jonathan Lethem’s genre-defying fiction weaves the conventions of noirs, westerns, science fiction, and graphic novels into something both evocative and wholly original. The “bard of Brooklyn” (LitHub) is the author of more than a dozen books—including the much-lauded novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. The National Book Critics Circle Award winning Motherless Brooklyn is Lethem’s breakthrough novel. Some of his other novels include Chronic City, a New York Times Best Book of 2009, The Feral Detective, You Don’t Love Me Yet, Dissident Gardens, and The Arrest.
Lethem’s nonfiction, which includes essays on writing and music, is as compelling and observant as his fiction. With Kevin Dettmar, Lethem edited Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z. In More Alive and Less Lonely, Lethem offers us a decade’s work of his incisive, passionate writing on writing. His honors include being named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library, an honorary doctorate from the Pratt Institute, and serving as the second Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College, succeeding David Foster Wallace. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Granta, and McSweeney’s, and he has also served as a guest director at the Telluride Film Festival.