Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing

Description

Author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem is one of the most celebrated and significant American writers working today. This new scholarly study draws on a deep knowledge of all Lethem's work to explore the range of his writing, from his award-winning fiction to his work in comics and criticism. Reading Lethem in relation to five themes crucial to his work, Joseph Brooker considers influence and intertextuality; the role of genres such as crime, science fiction and the Western; the imaginative production of worlds; superheroes and comic book traditions; and the representation of New York City. Close readings of Lethem's fiction are contextualized by reference to broader conceptual and comparative frames, as well as to Lethem's own voluminous non-fictional writing and his adaptation of precursors from Franz Kafka to Raymond Chandler. Rich in critical insight, Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing demonstrates how an understanding of this author illuminates contemporary literature and culture at large.

Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His previous books include Joyce's Critics (2004), Flann O'Brien (2005) and Literature of the 1980s (2010).

Joseph Brooker's Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing is an important new addition to the growing bookshelf of excellent scholarship devoted to Lethem's voluminous output. Wrestling Lethem's work free of the problematic label, postmodernism, Brooker eschews the misleadingly tidy safety of chronological order, and instead deftly shuffles Lethem's fiction under a sequence of key rubrics, to meticulously analyse the spectrum of his concerns, from the complexities of world making to the pathos of the superheroes' confrontation with "the indignities of mundane reality." Attuned to both Lethem's place amongst his contemporaries (Egan, Franzen, Wallace), and his skilful borrowings from the past (from DeLillo and Dick to The Trashmen), this is a compelling and comprehensive analysis of a major writer. * Stephen J. Burn, Reader in American Literature after 1945, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow *