The Ecstasy Of Influence Nonfictions, Etc..

What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? 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. A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds ligh...