About the Book

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, “made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts” before diverting, at nineteen, to prose. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates—and mourns—this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book. 

Cellophane Bricks mortars together Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends with dozens of original essays. Here we tour his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture; and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. Unique in Lethem’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture. Gorgeously designed, with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere, Cellophane Bricks is a ravishing assemblage for story lovers of all kinds.

Praise for Cellophane Bricks

“How does a fiction writer write about art? By analogy, of course. The many worlds of art reflected in these pages engender spirals of narrative and anecdote and samples of other people’s books dropped in and crossfaded. The media talk to each other like two people, awake but still dreaming, on opposite ends of the couch.”

—Lucy Sante

“Jonathan Lethem continues to teach me how to write about and with and underneath the art of others—whether it’s comics, graffiti, literature, or fine art. His attention is a catalyst all its own, transforming all it graces.”

—Catherine Lacey 

“An acclaimed author celebrates creativity . . . A sometimes lyrical, sometimes surreal, always surprising volume, profusely illustrated with images of paintings (including a few of his own early works), sculpture, collages, movie stills, graffiti, book jackets, photographs, and comics…. Astute, often idiosyncratic responses to works of art.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Jonathan Lethem

“Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture.”

—USA Today

“The expected and welcome pleasures of reading Lethem: his intellect, dialogue and wry humor . . . so much of his work [is] inventive, entertaining and superbly written.” 

—New York Times Book Review

“He remains . . . a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction.” 

—Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic

“Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist.”

—Boston Globe

“I love and admire the way Lethem’s always pushing at the edges of the form. He’s so in command of the material, both of the subject and the language, that it sometimes feels as if he’s improvising on it, or even floating free of it completely, the way a jazz musician might. His wonderfully corrosive humor is underpinned by a strange, mixed sense of outrage and tenderness.” 

—Rupert Thomson, author of The Book of Revelation and Dartmouth Park

“A writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them with unapologetic enthusiasm.”

—The Telegraph

“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist.

—Austin American-Statesman

“The quality of Lethem’s prose and the exuberance of his imagination are reasons enough to read [him] . . . When it comes to style, Lethem has few equals.”

—Miami Herald

“Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America.”

—Dana Spiotta

“One of his generation’s finest writers.” 

—The Maine Edge

About the Author