Jonathan Lethem on Novel Writing as a Memory Art

The novelist, essayist, and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem, author of the new book “Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture” (ZE Books), discusses his passion for book dedications; the time he spent with James Brown and Bob Dylan, respectively, when profiling them for Rolling Stone in the mid-aughts; how his writing is, in part, a way of dealing with and healing from his mother’s death in 1978, at age 36; and why he views his work as “fundamentally commemorative.”