What’s a novelist likely to perform with contemporary tradition? And what’s modern culture sup­posed regarding novelists? In The Ecstasy of Impact, Jonathan Lethem, tangling using what he calls the “white elephant” part of the writer as community intellectual, finds an astonishing selection of answers.

A constellation of previously released pieces and fresh essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s created, this quantity sheds light on a range of topics from sex in movie theater to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, reserve touring, and Marlon Brando, aswell as on the shelf’s worthy of of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, Adam Hardwood, and oth­ers. And, authoring Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through 2 decades of writing, Lethem sheds an similarly solid light on himself.