The Ecstasy of Influence
  • Published: 15 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099563433
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $45.00

The Ecstasy of Influence

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A career-spanning collection of writings - essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction and commentary - from one of the greats of contemporary American literature.

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.
  • Published: 15 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099563433
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $45.00
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About the author

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times-bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, 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.

portrait photo of Jonathan Lethem

Also by Jonathan Lethem

Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z
The Blot
Lucky Alan
Dissident Gardens
They Live
Vintage Book Of Amnesia
See all

Praise for The Ecstasy of Influence

Thoughtful and rambunctious ... a jazzy, patchwork memoir ... [a] fresh, erudite, zestful, funny frolic in the great fields of creativity

Booklist

Lethem writes with a commitment to sharing his enthusiasm for whatever obsesses him ... While the results illuminate his formative influences and artistic development, they also cast considerable light on the culture at large, which is both reflected in Lethem's work and has profoundly shaped it

Kirkus Reviews

The pleasure for readers is twofold: on one hand, there is the intrinsic interest in the subjects...On the other, there’s the fact that this is Lethem telling us these things, and how it gives an insight into his own creative practice

Guardian

A collage of what makes Lethem tick

Monocle

A high-wire juggling act where all the balls are kept spinning perfectly

Irish Independent

Hefty and remarkable... These byways, all of which make room for eccentric flights as well as proper essays, augment the charm and impact of what Lethem prefers to call an autobiographical collage

The New York Times Book Review

I love this book

The Los Angeles Times

He’s a novelist who has spent a lifetime creating his own subversive pantheon, a jumpy CBGB’s of the literary soul… Several of the essays here marinate in the fish sauce that is literary gossip… feisty, freewheeling, funny

The New York Times

The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited… Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it

New York Observer

Jonathan Lethem, the New York novelist, writes superb essays

William Leith, Scotsman

Superb collection of essays… Clever but satisfying, too

Lesley McDowell, Glasgow Sunday Herald

Jonathan Lethem...writes superb essays... lovely subtlety

Evening Standard

Witty, astute and irreverent

James Urquhart, Financial Times

A funny and clever selection of essays

Observer

Impassioned and detailed studies offset with bagatelles

Stuart Kelly, Guardian