Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture

Jonathan Lethem 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. “Cellophane Bricks takes us under the hood, revealing the ways that art and life are coextensive . . . The book, for me, sits spine to spine with the collected art writing of the late, great Peter Schjeldahl . . . His book is a subtle reminder that criticism of any kind should aspire to start a trialogue with the creator and reader—to solicit a visceral response—and impart aesthetic bliss.” Artforum Publication Date: 19.09.24 ISBN: 9798988670001 Extent: 416 pages Format: Hardback ***Please note, if out of stock at our warehouse, this title can be purchased at most good high street and online booksellers***