Special Guest: Jonathan Lethem

Kurt Andersen and writer Jonathan Lethem look at musicians, writers and artists who embrace solitude. Some exile themselves, others don’t have a choice. Either way, the experience of being alone affects their art and their personal lives.

A native of New York City, Jonathan Lethem is famous for turning genres like science fiction and detective stories inside out. He is the author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which received the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction in 1999. His other novels include Gun, with Occasional Music and As She Crawled Across the Table. In his latest book, The Disappointment Artist, Lethem writes about the passions that have ruled his life: for John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers, the Talking Heads, Philip K. Dick, and the impossibly mean writer Edward Dahlberg.