Book description
This volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in
cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book
touring and Marlon Brando. Then there are investigations of
a shelf's worth of Jonathan Letham's literary models and
contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis,
James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn,
his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing,
one of the greats of contemporary American literature sheds an equally
strong light on himself.
In
The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with
what he calls the 'white elephant' role of the writer as public
intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.
Funny and unfettered,
The Ecstasy of Influence simmers with direct challenges
to conventional wisdom and deep insights into the kaleidoscopic nature
of artistic vision, the primacy of the writer in the cultural
marketplace, and the way the author's own experiences have fuelled his
creative passions.
Jonathan Lethem is the
New York Times
-bestselling author of eight novels, including
Chronic City
,
The Fortress of Solitude
and
Motherless Brooklyn
. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has also published his stories and
essays in the
New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Esquire
and the
New York Times
, among others.
