The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

464 pages
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Published: 8 Nov 2011
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Editions
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Details

This edition

ISBN: 9780385534956

Format: Hardcover

Language: English

Publisher: Doubleday

Publication date: 8 November 2011

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Description

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? 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. 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. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.