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Written in October of 2002 by Stacey Wilson, university of colorado student.
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Jonathan Lethem
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Everything I write is informed by genre traditions, which I love deeply. At the same time, I don't think I've written without straining against genre boundaries, and I've often violated them outright.
On February 19, 1964, Jonathan Allen Lethem was born in New York City. He grew up in Brooklyn, as well as in Kansas City.
I grew up in a very borderline Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . So I definitely grew up in a world where my parents and their friends were living in the counterculture in the '70s. That very much shaped my perceptions, and I think it is detectable in my work in a lot of different ways.
While growing up, Lethem read Bradbury, Asimov, and Dostoyevsky: "I started where everyone starts, or should start, with science fiction, by reading I, Robot and The Martian Chronicles." He continued to enjoy science fiction while studying at the High School for Music and Art in New York City where consumed work by Kerouac, Vonnegut, P. K. Dick, Ballard, Chandler, Orwell, Kafka, and others.
Lethem tried his hand at writing in the late 70s with a magazine called The Literary Exchange. His next attempt was his novel Heroes. He wrote it while still in high school, but it was never published. After high school, Lethem sporadically attended Bennington College in Vermont. He dropped out the first semester to pursue writing another novel, but he moved on after a few years passed. He then shortly returned to Bennington, but yet again, he did not stay.
Not only is Lethem a writer, but he also was the editor for such magazines as Fence Magazine and Paradoxa. He instructed writers' workshops at various universities. A few examples are Imagination at Cleveland State, Stonecoast at the University of Southern Main, and the Clarion Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Lethem was also a judge for the Philip K. Dick Awards in 1993. Since Lethem's novel Gun, with Occasional Music "brought him comparisons to Philip K. Dick as well as to crime novelist Raymond Chandler" and Rolling Stone called him "the Elvis Costello of contemporary fiction," it is no wonder he was chosen to be in such an honored position.
I don't think I've written anything like my best work yet. I also think I'm less likely to create some single masterwork than a shelf of books that resonate with one another--if I have any lasting contribution it will be emergent. Thomas Berger's career is an example of what I mean... So it's important for me to produce the books. I have a lot of ideas I'm excited about.
Lethem has written a few novels during his short career, many about dystopias. Gun, with Occasional Music was Lethem's method of "trying to marry the hardboiled voice to the dystopian novel." In Amnesia Moon, he was writing "a book about that need [to have the world destroyed], about that yearning to live in dystopia." As She Climbed Across the Table is viewed by Lethem as "a campus novel." He "plays with a set of expectations and a set of literary conventions, formal restrictions as narrow [as] or narrower than many other genres." Lethem had wanted "to write a book with John Wayne in it," so he ended up with a "Southern Gothic Western set on Mars" called Girl in Landscape. He has also written the collection of stories The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye: Stories, as well as Motherless Brooklyn and This Shape We're In. In The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology, Lethem edits stories instead of actually writing them.
Even though Lethem has not been writing as long as other science fiction authors, Booklist praised his writing, calling Gun, with Occasional Music "a futuristic send up of Hammett-style detective novels, [trumpeting] the arrival of an innovative new science-fiction talent." The Library Journal claimed that Lethem "pulls even with, . . . , the works of such fine writers in the field as Sheila Finch and Mike Resnick." Malcolm Jones, Jr. in a Newsweek review said that Lethem has "emerged from the 'shadow' of such influences as P.K. Dick to 'deliver a droll, down-beat version that is both original and persuasive.' "
As Lethem keeps writing, he keeps earning more awards. In 1991, his novella "The Happy Man" received third place in the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, as well as being chosen a finalist for the Nebula Award. Publisher's Weekly named Gun, with Occasional Music one of the best books of 1994; Locus named it the best first novel of the year. Lethem was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, World Fantasy Convention for The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye: Stories. Recently, in 1999, The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction was presented to Lethem for Motherless Brooklyn.
Lethem now lives in Brooklyn, where he continues to write.
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