Jonathan Lethem

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Jonathan Lethem (2008)

Jonathan Allen Lethem (pronunciation: [ˈliːθəm]; born February 19, 1964 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American writer.

Life

Jonathan Lethem grew up in Kansas City , then Brooklyn. His father Richard Brown Lethem is a visual artist and his mother Judith died of cancer when he was a teenager. Lethem studied with Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in Vermont for a few semesters before moving to California and starting to write. He published his first short stories in the late 1980s, but it was only with his novels that he gained international attention in the 1990s. With his novel Gun, with Occasional Music , a futuristic detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler , he was a finalist of the Nebula Awards in 1994 and won the Locus Award in the "Best First Novel" category in a 1995 readers' vote by Locus magazine . The novel, whose German title is The Short Sleep (published in 2005 by Tropen Verlag), takes place in an almost postmodern landscape and is populated by bizarre, evolutionary manipulated characters, in whose world the news has been replaced by music and legal drugs like Forgettol and Acceptol enable a carefree life.

After the publication of his early stories in one volume ( The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye ), 1996 Lethems As She Climbed Across the Table (Eng. When they climbed over the table , 2005). The novel tells of a grotesquely comical love story between a physicist and an artificially created black hole called "Leak".
In 1997 he won the World Fantasy Award with the short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye .

In the late 1990s, Lethem moved back to Brooklyn from the Bay Area . His next book after moving was Girl in Landscape . The plot is similar to the Western Black Hawk (1956) starring John Wayne . A young girl in puberty grappling with a new world populated by aliens ("Archbuilders").

The first novel Lethem began to write after his return was Motherless Brooklyn (German Motherless Brooklyn , 2005), which takes up the detective theme again. The popular crook Frank Minna shows up one day at the St. Vincent Orphanage and takes the eccentric Lionel and three other boys on his mysterious jobs across Brooklyn . When Frank is stabbed, Lionel, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome , sets out on a difficult search for the killer. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award , the Macallan Gold Dagger Award for crime fiction, the Salon.com Book Award , and was named Book of the Year by Esquire . The film of the same name was made in 2019  - with Edward Norton , who also directed, as well as Bruce Willis , Gugu Mbatha-Raw , Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe .

In 2003 Lethem published the autobiographically inspired educational novel The Fortress of Solitude (German: The Fortress of Solitude , Tropen Verlag 2004). This tells of the white boy Dylan Ebdus, who moved with his parents to the rough heart of Brooklyn at the beginning of the 1970s, where every affection must be fought for like a piece of asphalt while playing on the street. Protected only by his black friend Mingus Rude, he explores the pulsating universe from the voices of the street, the superpowered heroes of tattered comic books and the energy of funk, graffiti and drugs. The Fortress of Solitude was named Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and has been translated into several languages.

His second collection of short stories Men and Cartoons , which came out at the end of 2004 and was published in German in 2005 under the title Menschen und Superhelden , brings together nine fantastic stories in which Lethem dissects American pop and street culture in order to create unique fictional worlds.

His novel You don't love me yet from 2007 was published in Germany under the title You love me, you don't love me .

In 1987 Jonathan Lethem married the writer Shelley Jackson , and in 1998 they divorced. Lethem lived in Brooklyn until 2010 when he relocated to Claremont , California for family reasons . There he teaches creative writing at Pomona College, succeeding David Foster Wallace .

In 2005 he was a MacArthur Fellow .

bibliography

Novels

Novellas

  • This Shape We're In . in: McSweeney's, New York 2000

Volumes of stories

Non-fiction

Autobiographical

  • The Beards - An Adolescence in Disguise [autobiographical essay]. in: New Yorker, February 28, 2005
  • The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions etc . Doubleday, New York 2011. ISBN 0-385-53495-7

As editor

  • The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss . Vintage Books, New York 2000. ISBN 978-0-375-70661-5
  • Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country, & More . Da Capo Press, Cambridge 2002. ISBN 978-0-306-81166-1
  • Fridays at Enrico's . [ Don Carpenter's novel , finished by Jonathan Lethem], Counterpoint, Berkeley 2014. ISBN 978-1-619-02301-7

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Jonathan Lethem Reading and Why I Need GPS . November 15, 2004. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  2. ↑ Edemariam, Aida. "The borrower" , The Guardian , June 2, 2007. Retrieved on 25 May, 2010.
  3. ↑ Tobias Rapp: Out of New York . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 2011, p. 118-120 ( Online - Feb. 21, 2011 ).
  4. ^ Post from Stalin and from my mother. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of February 16, 2014, p. 41
personal data
SURNAME Lethem, Jonathan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lethem, Jonathan Allen (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 19th February 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York