Special Offers see all
More at Powell'sRecently Viewed clear list
Original Essays | April 29, 2013
2 comments
|
 
$10.95
List price:
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsThe Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.by Jonathan Lethem
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"Novelist Lethem's collection of new and previously published works is embedded with cultural influences; particularly prominent is Norman Mailer's 1959 Advertisements for Myself, which functions like a template for this compendium of obscure writings, liner notes, book introductions, memoir, early unpublished fiction, and even blog bits. The title essay, which first appeared in Harper's in 2007, is a 'collage text' in which Lethem borrows the words of others, from T.S. Eliot and Muddy Waters to Disney films, creating a commentary on plagiarism, allusions, and appropriation. Lethem writes: 'Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.' Like Mailer, self-exposure commentaries are interleaved throughout, and Mailer's notorious 'Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room' gives Lethem a springboard for evaluations of writers: J.G. Ballard, Paula Fox, Shirley Jackson, and especially the cosmic consciousness of Philip K. Dick, a major influence on Lethem. In a tsunami of literary and cinematic references, familiar and obscure, Lethem easily rises to the surface as a brilliant, incisive essayist who loves to sing the body eclectic." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review:"Did I say I love this book? Well, OK then, I love this book....bring[s] a novelist's sensibility to these essays, to find a through line, to approximate a narrative. It offers a way, in other words, to rethink the collection as a book in its own right — and not just that, but a book about a big idea." The Los Angeles Times
Review:"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.....[H]igh ambitions and a strong sense of purpose." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review:"A fresh, erudite, zestful, funny frolic in the great fields of creativity." Booklist
About the AuthorJonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn.
Table of Contentsi: My Plan to Begin With
My Plan to Begin With, Part One The Used Bookshop Stories The Books They Read Going Under in Wendover Zelig of Notoriety Clerk
ii: Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and Postmodernism My Plan to Begin With, Part Two Holidays Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick) What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention The Best of Calvino: Against Completism Postmodernism as Liberty Valance The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard) Give Up
iii: Plagiarisms The Ecstasy of Influence The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence Always Crashing in the Same Car Against “Pop” Culture Furniture
iv: Film and Comics Supermen!: An Introduction Top-Five Depressed Superheroes The Epiphany Izations Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness) Godfather IV Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) Kovacs’s Gift Marlon Brando Breaks Missed Opportunities Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks The Drew Barrymore Stories
v: Wall Art The Collector (Fred Tomaselli) An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn) The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel) Todd James Writing and the Neighbor Arts Live Nude Models On a Photograph of My Father Hazel
vi: 9/11 and Book Tour Nine Failures of the Imagination Further Reports in a Dead Language To My Italian Friends My Egyptian Cousin Cell Phones Proximity People Repeating Myself Bowels of Compassion Stops Advertisements for Norman Mailer White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist
vii: Dylan, Brown, and Others The Genius of James Brown People Who Died The Fly in the Ointment Dancing About Architecture Dylan Interview Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens) Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Rick James an orchestra of light that was electric
viii: Working the Room Bolaño’s 2666 Homely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox) Ambivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger) Rushmore Versus Abundance Outcastle (Shirley Jackson) Thursday (G. K. Chesterton) My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith The American Vicarious (Nathanael West)
ix: The Mad Brooklynite Ruckus Flatbush Crunch Rolls Children with Hangovers L. J. Davis Agee’s Brooklyn Breakfast at Brelreck’s The Mad Brooklynite
x: What Remains of My Plan Micropsia Zeppelin Parable What Remains of My Plan Memorial Things to Remember 435 What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Product Details
Other books you might likeRelated Subjects
Featured Titles » Culture
|
|||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
Follow us on...
|
||||||||||
