BOOK: Jonathan Lethem-Cellophane Bricks, ZE Books

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. Lethem grew up in a world of paintings and books: “My father made the paintings and my mother handed me the books, and talked about them, and read them herself. I began wanting to make the paintings before I can remember….I began wanting to make the books too, soon enough.” With his father or on class trips, he was a frequent visitor to most of New York’s museums, going so often, he recalls, “that I couldn’t remember a time before I knew those rooms and some of the furniture inside them.” In high school, he would drop in at the Met’s Chinese Garden to take an afternoon nap. He pursued the dream of being a painter as a student at the High School of Music and Art, but once he went to college, he put away his “fantasies of becoming a painter, sculptor, cartoonist, or film director” and turned exclusively “to text, to narrative.” As this collection of stories, essays, dialogues, and reminiscences reveals, though, Lethem still feels a visceral connection to art: “By identifying with visual artists,” he writes, “I’m searching for a lost self” as well as “a continuation, not an interruption” of his father’s enduring influence. Unique in Lethem’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, “Cellophane Bricks” by ZE Books comprises a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture. Gorgeously designed, with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere, the book isa ravishing assemblage for story lovers of all kinds.-Efi Michalarou