More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers

In this collection, novelist and essayist Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude) brings together decades of book reviews, introductions to anthologies and collected works, and other criticism that reveal his inquisitive and expansive reading habits. Lethem delivers these pieces in a relaxed, loose style, and as a novelist-critic, his language is typically articulate and sophisticated. He addresses the work under consideration with humorous and sometimes obsessive anecdotes about his own life, such as the stories told here in the selections about novelists Philip Roth or Kazuo Ishiguro. Lethem describes this approach as "more personal, more willingly subjective," and its overall effect is to bring the reader closer to the well-known (and less well-known) writers under review, and also to Lethem. The collection is edited and introduced by Boucher (English, Boston Coll.; Golden Delicious).