1. Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
24 Facts About Jonathan Lethem
2.
In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success.
3.
Jonathan Lethem's father was Protestant and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia.
4.
Jonathan Lethem gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars 21 times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K Dick.
5.
Jonathan Lethem created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
6.
Jonathan Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.
7.
Jonathan Lethem's first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons.
8.
The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Jonathan Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience.
9.
Partially inspired by Jonathan Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country, this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks.
10.
In 1996, Jonathan Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Brooklyn.
11.
Jonathan Lethem has said that Girl in Landscapes plot and characters, including the figures of a young girl and a violently protective father figure, were "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which he is "obsessed".
12.
The first novel Jonathan Lethem began after returning to New York City was Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme.
13.
Jonathan Lethem maintained objective realism while exploring subjective alterity through Lionel Essrog.
14.
Jonathan Lethem's protagonist has Tourette's syndrome and is obsessed with language.
15.
In 2003, Jonathan Lethem commented on the concept of "genre bending":.
16.
In November 2000, Jonathan Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist.
17.
In September 2006, Jonathan Lethem wrote the article "The Genius of Bob Dylan", a lengthy interview with Bob Dylan, which was published in Rolling Stone.
18.
The original title was Monster Eyes, but Jonathan Lethem was convinced to change it by his publisher.
19.
In 2005, Jonathan Lethem had announced that he was planning to revive the Marvel Comics character Omega the Unknown in a ten-issue series to be published in 2006.
20.
In early 2007, Jonathan Lethem began work on Chronic City, which was published on October 13,2009.
21.
Jonathan Lethem's essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism", is a passionate defense of plagiarism and a call for a return to a "gift economy" in the arts.
22.
Jonathan Lethem co-wrote six out of nine songs on the Lee Ranaldo album Electric Trim, released in 2017.
23.
Jonathan Lethem wrote the introduction to David Bowman's 2019 novel, Big Bang.
24.
In 1987, Jonathan Lethem married the writer and artist Shelley Jackson; they were divorced by 1997.