Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture -- Jonathan Lethem, Hardcover
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 fiction. 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 gathers a lifetime of Lethem's art-writing, along with stunning, full-color images from the author's own collection and elsewhere. Here we tour Lethem's fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends; 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. More than just a compilation, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of Jonathan Lethem's parallel life in visual culture--a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds, and an essential, singular brick to add to your own collection.
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: ZE Books
Published: 07/30/2024
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9798988670001
Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2024
Product Tags:
Art, Biography & Autobiography, Folk & Outsider Art, Hardcover, Jonathan Lethem, Memoirs, Subjects & Themes, ZE, ZE BooksContact form
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