Episode 50: Jonathan Lethem

He’s the best-selling author of books like Motherless Brooklyn. His latest is The Arrest, about a world in which technology stops working. Jonathan Lethem is a storyteller who mixes genres like hard-boiled crime novels, post-apocalyptic science fiction and superhero comics. Growing up in Bohemian Brooklyn in the 1970s, Lethem learned everything there was to know about the music of Bob Dylan and saw Star-Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release. He received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and sold his papers to Yale University. Those papers include drawings of vomiting cats. More on those cats in my conversation with Jonathan Lethem on “Now What?”