The Ecstasy of Influence by Lethem, Jonathan -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Cover About the Author Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Contents Preface I: My Plan to Begin With

My Plan to Begin With, Part One The Used Bookshop Stories The Books They Read Going Under in Wendover Zelig of Notoriety Clerk

II: Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and Postmodernism

My Plan to Begin With, Part Two Holidays Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick) What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention The Best of Calvino: Against Completism Postmodernism as Liberty Valance The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard) Give Up

III: Plagiarisms

The Ecstasy of Influence The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence Always Crashing in the Same Car Against “Pop” Culture Furniture

IV: Film and Comics

Supermen!: An Introduction Top-Five Depressed Superheroes The Epiphany Izations Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness) Godfather IV Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) Kovacs’s Gift Marlon Brando Breaks Missed Opportunities Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks The Drew Barrymore Stories

V: Wall Art

The Collector (Fred Tomaselli) An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn) The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel) Todd James Writing and the Neighbor Arts Live Nude Models On a Photograph of My Father Hazel

VI: 9/11 and Book Tour

Nine Failures of the Imagination Further Reports in a Dead Language To My Italian Friends My Egyptian Cousin Cell Phones Proximity People Repeating Myself Bowels of Compassion Stops Advertisements for Norman Mailer White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist

VII: Dylan, Brown, and Others

The Genius of James Brown People Who Died The Fly in the Ointment Dancing About Architecture Dylan Interview Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens) Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Rick James An Orchestra of Light That was Electric

VIII: Working the Room

Bolaño’s 2666 Homely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox) Ambivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger) Rushmore Versus Abundance Outcastle (Shirley Jackson) Thursday (G. K. Chesterton) My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith The American Vicarious (Nathanael West)

IX: The Mad Brooklynite

Ruckus Flatbush Crunch Rolls Children with Hangovers L. J. Davis Agee’s Brooklyn Breakfast at Brelreck’s The Mad Brooklynite

X: What Remains of My Plan

Micropsia My Internet Zeppelin Parable What Remains of My Plan Memorial Things to Remember

Acknowledgments Excerpt from Dissident Gardens