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The Ecstasy of Influence
The Ecstasy of Influence
Jul 28, 2025 4:08 PM

Author:Jonathan Lethem

The Ecstasy of Influence

This volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring and Marlon Brando. Then there are investigations of a shelf's worth of Jonathan Letham's literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, one of the greats of contemporary American literature sheds an equally strong light on himself.

In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the 'white elephant' role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.

Funny and unfettered, The Ecstasy of Influence simmers with direct challenges to conventional wisdom and deep insights into the kaleidoscopic nature of artistic vision, the primacy of the writer in the cultural marketplace, and the way the author's own experiences have fuelled his creative passions.

Reviews

A high-wire juggling act where all the balls are kept spinning perfectly

—— Irish Independent

The pleasure for readers is twofold: on one hand, there is the intrinsic interest in the subjects...On the other, there’s the fact that this is Lethem telling us these things, and how it gives an insight into his own creative practice

—— Guardian

A collage of what makes Lethem tick

—— Monocle

Thoughtful and rambunctious ... a jazzy, patchwork memoir ... [a] fresh, erudite, zestful, funny frolic in the great fields of creativity

—— Booklist

Hefty and remarkable... These byways, all of which make room for eccentric flights as well as proper essays, augment the charm and impact of what Lethem prefers to call an autobiographical collage

—— The New York Times Book Review

I love this book

—— The Los Angeles Times

He’s a novelist who has spent a lifetime creating his own subversive pantheon, a jumpy CBGB’s of the literary soul… Several of the essays here marinate in the fish sauce that is literary gossip… feisty, freewheeling, funny

—— The New York Times

The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited… Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it

—— New York Observer

Lethem writes with a commitment to sharing his enthusiasm for whatever obsesses him ... While the results illuminate his formative influences and artistic development, they also cast considerable light on the culture at large, which is both reflected in Lethem's work and has profoundly shaped it

—— Kirkus Reviews

Jonathan Lethem...writes superb essays... lovely subtlety

—— Evening Standard

Jonathan Lethem, the New York novelist, writes superb essays

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Superb collection of essays… Clever but satisfying, too

—— Lesley McDowell , Glasgow Sunday Herald

A funny and clever selection of essays

—— Observer

Impassioned and detailed studies offset with bagatelles

—— Stuart Kelly , Guardian

Witty, astute and irreverent

—— James Urquhart , Financial Times

Reading JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage undertow. His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race, animal rights and confession

—— Intelligent Life

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

—— Eileen Battersby , Irish Times

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

—— i

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, “you think too much,” Elena says to Simón. “This has nothing to do with thinking.”... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

—— The Asylum

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

—— Nadine O'Regan , Sunday Business Post

An intellectual adventure

—— Shanice McBean , Socialist Review

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

—— Vivek Santayana , Edinburgh Journal

With elegant ease, Jones spins a good old-fashioned comedy of manners

—— Katie Owen , Sunday Telegraph
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