Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem (who visits today) was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review last Sunday by Yiyun Li.
Longtime readers of Jonathan Lethem will not be surprised to learn that New York City is the setting of his new novel, “Dissident Gardens,” though center stage this time is not the author’s native Brooklyn or the Upper East Side but Queens — specifically, Sunnyside Gardens, the planned community complex built in the 1920s. Readers may, however, be either disappointed or relieved to find no superheroes, no aliens, not even a Tourette’s-afflicted self-appointed private detective. No genre-bending this time, the novel seems to say: spanning 80 years and three generations, it realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American revolutionaries.
More in the NYTBR: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/jonathan-lethems-dissident-gardens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
More about Lethem's visit today: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
Full series: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lethem
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Lethem on Front Page of NY Times Book Review
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
The Joys of Plagiarism
Jonathan Lethem, who visits tomorrow, is the author of a widely circulated essay, published originally in Harper's, and subsequently in The Best American Essays 2008, edited by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, that justifies the act of plagiarism:
"Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator — marked by her forever — remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita."
"The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory?"
More: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/
Times Union Announces Writers Institute Fall Season
Jonathan Lethem launches New York State Writers Institute season
His latest novel, "Dissident Gardens," is a multigenerational family tale about communists and radicals living in Queens, from the 1930s to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, and is the biggest canvas Lethem has every worked with. Central to the novel is the tale of two women struggling to follow their dreams: the mercurial Rose, known as the Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, who torments anyone within reach; and her daughter Miriam, who, much to her mother's chagrin, embraces Greenwich Village counterculture.
Read More......
Friday, September 6, 2013
The Bard of Brooklyn
TIME magazine proclaimed Jonathan Lethem "The Bard of Brooklyn" in a 2003 review of his acclaimed novel, The Fortress of Solitude.
"one of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year."
Read more of Lev Grossman's review in TIME: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,483318,00.html
Lethem opens our Fall 2013 series Wednesday, 9/11: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
See the full series here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lethem
Lethem's New Novel Reviewed in Elle Magazine
"This novel's powerful and polarizing cultural, political, and racial energies are animated by a typically Lethem-esque cast of zanies, communalists, sexual adventurers, innocents, druggies, dreamers, and do-gooders -- cosmopolitans all -- whose lives collide and clash with gut-busting humor, heart, and hubris, which Lethem delivers in his seductively vertiginous prose."
Lethem's new novel is reviewed in the September 2013 issue of Elle (not available yet online).
Lethem visits us Wednesday, September 11th: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
Here are some more reviews: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/212150/dissident-gardens-by-jonathan-lethem#praise
Friday, August 30, 2013
Jonathan Lethem's Bedside Table
Jonathan Lethem, who visits Albany on 9/11, talks about what he's reading and what he's going to read next in last Sunday's New York Times "By the Book" interview:
I’ve got a beautiful stack right here: Hilton Als’s “White Girls,” Tao Lin’s “Taipei,” Jamie Quatro’s “I Want to Show You More,” the new compendiums of William Gaddis’s and Italo Calvino’s letters. And “Daniel Deronda,” which, you know, I always meant to read and never got around to. I hear it’s good.
More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/jonathan-lethem-by-the-book.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
More on Lethem's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
3 Standout Picks for September in Times Union
Jonathan Lethem, who visits us on 9/11, was named one of three standout events for September by the Times Union arts and entertainment team of Amy Biancolli, Steve Barnes and Michael Janairo.
http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/September-picks-Three-standout-events-4772071.php
Amy Biancolli says:
Jonathan Lethem writes weird stuff. Dense, descriptive, laced with mystery and quirk, his novels crisscross a wild expanse of genres. Sometimes these genres are obvious: His 1994 debut, "Gun, with Occasional Music," is a wickedly readable gumshoe novel peopled with hyper-evolved animals. (One of the thugs is a kangaroo.)
More in the TU: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/September-picks-Three-standout-events-4772071.php
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Jonathan Lethem Presents New Novel, 9/11
Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author, to read from his new novel,
Dissident Gardens, September 11, 2013.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel,
Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of
the novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), and The Fortress of
Solitude (2003), will read from and discuss his new novel, Dissident
Gardens (2013), a family saga about three generations of New York City
leftists, on Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8 p.m. in the Recital Hall,
Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany's uptown campus. Earlier
that same day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar in the
Standish Room, Science Library, on the uptown campus. The events are free and
open to the public, and are cosponsored by the New York State Writers
Institute.
Jonathan Lethem is a novelist and critic celebrated for his scholarly
interest in American pop culture, and for novels that blend a variety of
genres, including comic books, detective fiction, and science fiction. He
received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his bestselling novel Motherless
Brooklyn (1999), the story of a detective with Tourette's Syndrome.
In 1999, Lethem was the only novelist listed among Newsweek's
"100 People for the New Century." He received a MacArthur Foundation
Fellowship in 2005.
Dissident Gardens is the story of three generations of
American radicals living in Sunnyside, Queens, and Greenwich Village, as they
take part in the home-grown Communism of the 1930s up through the Occupy Wall
Street movement of more recent days. The Kirkus reviewer said, "A
dysfunctional family embodies a dysfunctional epoch, as the novelist continues
his ambitious journey through decades, generations and the boroughs of New
York... The setup of this novel is so frequently funny that it reads like
homage to classic Philip Roth."
Lethem's previous novel was Chronic City (2009), the tale of two
friends down on their luck-one an actor, the other a critic-as they go about
their lives in a surreal and futuristic Manhattan. The novel was named one of
the New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2009." Writing in the New
York Times Book Review, Gregory Cowles called it, "Astonishing....
Knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to
walk a straight line..... Intricate and seamless....A dancing showgirl of a
novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it's also the girl next door: a traditional
bildungsroman with a strong moral compass."
Other novels by Lethem include You Don't Love Me Yet (2007), The
Fortress of Solitude (2003), Girl in Landscape (1998), As She
Climbed Across the Table (1997), Amnesia Moon (1995) and Gun,
with Occasional Music (1994). The story of two friends (one black, one
white) growing up in the 1960s and '70s, The Fortress of Solitude became
a national bestseller and was named a New York Times "Editor's
Choice." Novelist Richard Russo called it, "a grim, brave, soaring
American masterpiece."
Lethem's most recent book of nonfiction is Fear of Music (2012), a
passionate tribute to and scholarly analysis of the Talking Heads' same-titled
third album. The reviewer for the London Observer called it,
"stylish and illuminating," and said, "be warned: his obsession
is contagious." Lethem's other nonfiction works include the essay
collection, The Ecstasy of Influence (2011), which features as its
title piece a widely-discussed defense of the act (and art) of plagiarism; The
Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick (2011, with Pamela Jackson), featuring
excerpts from the journals of one of Lethem's greatest literary heroes; and They
Live (2010), an analysis of John Carpenter's 1988 cult film of the same
name.
Lethem also edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing
on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000), and was the founding fiction editor
of Fence magazine.
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or
online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Jonathan Lethem's Favorite Songs in Elle Magazine
Jonathan Lethem, bestselling novelist whose work is saturated with references to pop music (and who visits us on the portentous date of 9/11), lists his favorite songs in the recent issue of Elle magazine, including songs that served as inspiration in writing his new, critically-acclaimed novel, Dissident Gardens.
http://www.elle.com/pop-culture/reviews/jonathan-lethem-playlist
Among the songs is the 1961 "Talkin' Hava Nagila Blues" by a young Bob Dylan (still Robert Zimmerman, pictured here).
Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwrSGPd4ZE
For more on Lethem's upcoming visit to Albany visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
Monday, August 26, 2013
Jonathan Lethem Coming on September 11
Jonathan Lethem, prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City will open our Fall 2013 Visiting Writers Series.
Lethem will present his new novel, Dissident Gardens (2013), a family saga about three generations of New York City leftists.
“A dysfunctional family embodies a dysfunctional epoch, as the novelist continues his ambitious journey through decades, generations and the boroughs of New York... The setup of this novel is so frequently funny that it reads like homage to classic Philip Roth.” (Kirkus)
Lethem visits on Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the uptown campus. The events are free and open to the public, and are cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.
Read more here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html