Jonathan Lethem Speaks with Claire L. Evans at Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth
Oct 12, 3 PM PT • Los Angeles, CA: Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth • 917 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s 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 celebrates—and mourns—this 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 Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book.
Cellophane Bricks mortars together Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends with dozens of original essays. Here we tour his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture; and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. Unique in Lethem’s 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 author’s own collection and elsewhere, Cellophane Bricks is a ravishing assemblage for story lovers of all kinds. Lethem also discusses Brooklyn Crime Novel, out now in paperback.
About the Author
Jonathan Lethem is the author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and twelve other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in five volumes, and his work translated into over thirty languages. He has been recipient of The National Book Critics Circle Award, The World Fantasy Award, The Berlin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
About the Author
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring biology, technology, and culture. She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform,, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages and was named one of the Top 10 Best Nonfiction Tech Books of All Time in 2023. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to students in the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design.
About the Venue:
Artbook is an arts and culture bookstore within Hauser & Wirth's Los Angeles location in a converted historic flour mill. Bringing an experimental dynamic to book selling, Artbook devotes a large portion of its retail space to spotlight selections that change every several months, focusing in great depth upon different movements and themes in contemporary and 20th-century art. Complementing current exhibitions as well as new developments in art practices and writing, these rotating thematic displays include new releases in addition to important backlist books, indie press titles, imported catalogues and out-of-print selections.
For all press inquiries please contact Alexander Galan, ag@vidoun.com or Thora Siemsen, tds@vidoun.com
A rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds.
Release: Jul 30, 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 9798988670001 • 424 pages
UK release: Sep 19, 2024 • UK Price: £30
