Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novelsMotherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many othersplay with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his fathers studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts before diverting, at nineteen, to prose. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebratesand mournsthis forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethems writing, is the subject of this book.

Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture mortars together Lethems fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends with dozens of original essays ranging from comics and graffiti art, to his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, to his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. Unique in Lethems kaleidoscopic oeuvre, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture. Gorgeously designed, with stunning, full-color images from the authors own collection and elsewhere, Cellophane Bricks is a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds.