Tag: jonathan lethem

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Culture

Dear Ms. Lonelyhearts

Before Sugar, there was Dear Abby and before Dear Abby there was the patron saint of advice columnists, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Upon her passing and in tribute to Pauline Phillips, who wrote the original Dear Abby column before turning it over to her daughter in 2002, below is Jonathan Lethem’s intro to West’s novel,…

Categories
Culture

Jonathan Lethem on Being Outre

This seriocomic quote from Jonathan Lethem, author of Men and Cartoons and The Fortress of Solitude, succinctly sums up the pervasive sense of outsider-ness many creative types of my generation (x) experience to this day: “Listen, you can’t imagine what a freak I was. I worked in used bookstores as a teenager. I grew up…