Jonathan Lethem

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Brooklyn writers are joining the fight against Bruce Ratner's vision for Atlantic Yards by donating short essays and stories to Brooklyn Was Mine, an anthology compiled by two Vogue senior editors that will benefit Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. The book will be available in stores—mostly in the quaint, tweedy-type joints—starting today. According to press notes, 20 authors submitted works, including Jonthan Lethem, who published "a wild, dystopian ride into Brooklyn's future" called "Ruckus Flatbush," and Jennifer Egan, who wrote about a Brooklyn Navy Yard worker who writes letters to her husband fighting in World War II. "Who is to say what will become of the place, or whether Brooklyn will retain its soul?" asked contributing writer Phillip Lopate in the introduction. "Whatever happens to Brooklyn," he answers, "its literary soul is sound and robust, and its writers fiercely loyal."

Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi and Darin Strauss will have a reading at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble next Wednesday, Jan. 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Full release after the jump.  read more »

Storied East Village literary haunt KGB Bar is shopping a new paperback fiction anthology to publishers this week, called The Greatest Stories Ever Read, according to literary agent Peter Steinberg, who is representing the book to publishers. The anthology, billed as "a greatest hits collection" of writing that has been read at KGB over the course of its 15-year history, will feature short works by Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Jonathan Ames, Norman Rush, Sam Lipsyte, and Daniel Handler. Francine Prose and Chuck Palahniuk have also agreed to contribute to the book once a contract has been signed.

The stories will be accompanied by brief testimonials from the authors about their experience reading at KGB, according to Mr. Steinberg.  read more »

Sloane Crosley, 29, has shilled for Joan Didion, Jonathan Lethem and—hairball!—Dave Eggers. Now she’s got her own book—and shiny hair that will make you weep!  read more »

While John Grisham's Playing for Pizza and Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon top the New York Times' best sellers list, we're poking our heads into BookCourt in Cobble Hill to see what Brooklynites are tucking into their totes.

Out in the Manhattan suburb (sorry, it's true!), where baby strollers, daddy-actor types and yoga-obsessed writers run rampant, it's not surprising that Tom Perrotta's new book The Abstinence Teacher tops the hardcover fiction list. After all, the guy wrote Little Children, the most angsty-cool anti-parenting guide ever written. In his new book, Mr. Perrotta abandons the kiddie playground for school to examine how a single sex education teacher will battle a herd of evangelical Christians trying to get her to ditch the old banana/condom demo and take on an abstinence curriculum. In The Abstinence Teacher, Mr. Perrotta continues "writing books for people who don't much like books—satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes," according to Benjamin Alsup at Esquire. Fun! But you could also follow Mr. Alsup's advice and just wait for the movie.  read more »

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude and “genre bending” hipster, chose several films for Jonathan Lethem Selects, a month-long film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the 2006/2007 chair of the Friends of BAM board, he chose High and Low, This Sporting Life, La Collectionneuse, The Lineup, Murder by Contract, Ruggles of Red Gap, Straight Time, Love Streams, and Shame.

Tonight at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., it’s 1963’s This Sporting Life, a movie about a working class coal-miner-turned-star rugby player directed by Lindsay Anderson.

Lethem feeds us a heaping spoonful of pretension (and a name-drop for our own Andrew Sarris!) in this interview on the BAM site:

Matthew Buchholz: Looking at the films you selected for the series here at BAM, is there any thread connecting all of them?

Jonathan Lethem: Well, at the risk of the tautology, "the thread in the Jonathan Lethem Selects films is that Jonathan Lethem selected them," when I glance at the list that resulted I can't keep from thinking that the only thing those films all have particularly in common—apart from the excellence which makes me confident of thrusting them on other viewers—is that they form a kind of descriptive outline (like the arctic explorers standing in an arc around the submerged frozen spaceship in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby version of The Thing) around my cinematic obsessions."  read more »

(Pic by Sylvia Plachy via randomhouse.com)

If you've followed the arguments against Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards proposal in Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem's "open letter" to Frank Gehry on Slate will sound familiar, but it is the second sign (after the Dan Zanes concert) of what Develop Don't Destroy's celebrity advisory board--which at first wasn't supposed to do anything but sit there and look pretty--might do for the opposition. (Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco told the Sun that what Lethem has done is embarrass himself.)  read more »