Long Lethem

The Paris Review had an impressively long interview with Jonathan Lethem right when The Fortress of Solitude came out in 2003. Fascinating stuff, especially for his insights into how he views fiction (right in line with my thoughts) and how Philip K. Dick influenced him:

Pulp SF of the 1930s magazine type is folk art. Then Dick comes along and isolates those tropes that connect it to literature, surrealism, film, comic books, rock and roll. He’s George Herriman, he’s Buster Keaton, he’s Bob Dylan. Dick discards the uninteresting stuff, the pedantic explanations, and preserves precisely the dreamlike, surrealist, evocative, paranoiac reverberations that were all I ever cared for, when I found them scattered elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine that someone else would think Dick had thrown out the wrong stuff, which is exactly what many who exalt the genre think.

If they do this sort of thing on a regular basis, I may have to subscribe!