Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Lethem" in All Categories

Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. One frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting - and fall desperately in love.

Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new listeners: a smorgasbord of fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles. Lethem is a trailblazer of a new kind of literary fiction, sampling high and low culture to create fictional worlds that are utterly original.

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces", Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession, in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" have led him home, home to his father's life as a painter, and to the source of his beginnings as a writer.

A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, 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, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth­ers.