Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels, including Girl In Landscape (Doubleday, 1998), The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003), Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009), and Dissident Gardens. His fifth book, Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday, 1999), a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction and the Macallan Gold Dagger, among other accolades. Translated into over thirty languages, Lethem’s work has been collected in five volumes, including the World Fantasy Award-winning The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (Harcourt, 1996). Several of his shorter works have been gathered in The Year’s Best Essays and The Best American Short Stories as well as other annual anthologies; his writing regularly appears in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. Lethem has received numerous distinctions, including the 2012 California Book Award, an honorary doctorate in Letters from the Pratt Institute (2011), and a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and in 2011 was named to the Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College.
In his proposal for his Academy project, “Love Boy, The Class, and Other Future Fictions,” Lethem outlined a series of partially developed novels and novellas. He writes: “While necessarily tentative and various, the next phase of my fiction writing is one of particular excitement, particularly the possibility that several of these proposed novellas may in fact intersect and therefore become my largest and most complex fictional structure to date.”
Meet Jonathan Lethem
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.
Upcoming events
Discover what’s coming up in the Academy’s public program this semester.
Past events
Lectures, readings, and conversations from the Academy’s public program.
Berlin Journal Articles
Essays, interviews, and creative work published in the Academy’s annual magazine.
Books
Books written by fellows of the Academy, many begun during a semester in Berlin.
Videos
Lectures, readings, and conversations filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center.
Dissident Gardens
Writer Jonathan Lethem reads from sections of his highly-acclaimed novel Dissident Gardens, depicting Miriam Zimmer as a teenager and after first making contact with her estranged father.
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
