Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Lethem Klappentext National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookA Best Book of the Year -Austin American-StatesmanIncludes a new, previously uncollected piece: "My Internet" In The Ecstasy of Influence, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces-essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism-which also doubles as a novelist's manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture. Inhaltsverzeichnis i: 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...

Autorentext

Jonathan Lethem

Klappentext

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year -Austin American-Statesman Includes a new, previously uncollected piece: "My Internet" In The Ecstasy of Influence, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces-essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism-which also doubles as a novelist's manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture.

Zusammenfassung
I love this book. . . . Less of a collection than a collage, a cut-and-paste self-portrait in which we see Lethem as he sees himself. . . . A book about a big idea. David L. Ulin, *Los Angeles Times

Begins with this idea of writer-as-magpie and takes it on a communitarian-artistic romp. . . . It s a grand performance. . . . And delivered with a wink. San Francisco Chronicle
Like almost everything Lethem has written, The Ecstasy of Influence is a reflection of, and a pixilated homage to, those whose work he fetishizes. If this book has a thesis, it s this: For an artist, influence is everything. The New York Times
[An] exuberant whiz-bang of an essay collection. The Daily Beast

Hefty and remarkable. . . . Dominating all is Lethem s prime concern always: the novel. . . . More exciting than any of his interesting-to-terrific fiction. Robert Christgau, The New York Times Book Review
[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why. Austin American-Statesman
Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources. . . . He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence. The Dallas Morning News
Lethem s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming. . . . His essays are zippy and freewheeling. Chicago Tribune

Sharp and funny. The Plain Dealer

Frank and boisterous. . . . 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. The New York Observer
This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author. The Independent (London)
The Ecstasy of Influence is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things. Salon

Smart and rollicking. . . . Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things not least among them writing itself. The Millions
A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader. National Post (Canada)
The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves. PopMatters

"The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Leseprobe

Postmodernism as Liberty Valance

Notes on a Ritual Killing
1. Spoiler alert. John Ford s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical Western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely. Actually I ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity in the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the lm sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary ction, of contemporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird persistent denial of a terri c number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that s to say, of any forthright address of what s called postmodernity, and what s lost in avoiding it (a sacri ce I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental for ction).

The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gun ght. A man stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man. The victim for this is, technically, murder represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkilla…