The Playful Tension of Art and Failure

Novelist Jonathan Lethem is the author of Girl In Landscape, Chronic City, and Brooklyn Crime Novel, as well as ten other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in seven volumes. His fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and he has been the recipient of The Berlin Prize and a Macarthur Fellowship among other honors. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.

He and Zuckerman discuss writing stories about Art, growing up as a child of a painter, where freedom is found, mirroring the world, doing his tricks, looking, kinship and generation, waiting and wondering, play, denial of independence, and memory and savoring!