Jan 26, 2024
On today's 14th Anniversary episode, I talk to MacArthur Genius
Grant-winning author Jonathan Lethem. Originally from Brooklyn, New
York, Jonathan at first thought he was going to be a visual artist
until some existential realizations about class and art in college
in the early 1980s left him disillusioned. He dropped out,
hitchhiked to California and started writing while he worked as a
clerk in used bookstores. In 1994, Harcourt Brace published his
first novel Gun, with Occasional Music, and since then he's written
a dozen more - just a sampling: Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress
of Solitude, Chronic City, The Feral Detective - as well as a
number of short story collections, and this is just scratching the
surface. Currently Jonathan is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of
Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College, and
his most recent book, Brooklyn Crime Novel, was published last
October by HarperCollins, and like everything else Jonathan writes,
it is great!
This is the
website for Beginnings, subscribe on Apple Podcasts,
follow me on Twitter. Check out my free
philosophy Substack where I write essays every couple
months here and my old
casiopop band's lost album here! And the comedy
podcast I do with my wife Naomi Couples Therapy can be
found here!