Lethem's first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music ( 1994), which won a Locus Award for best first novel, meticulously rehabilitates not only the ambience of Philip K Dick's California, but also the noir narrative voice that Cyberpunk writers notoriously acquired from writers like Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), not only through the exactitude of the stylistic miming involved, but also because the setting, characters and overall ambience of the tale directly homage the earlier masters. Other short material includes some exercises in apocalyptic post-modernism assembled in Kafka Americana (coll 1999) with Carter Scholz, with later stories assembled as Men and Cartoons: Stories (coll 2004) and Lucky Alan and Other Stories (coll 2015).
He began publishing sf in his own right with "The Cave Beneath the Falls" (January/February 1989 Aboriginal), and has published at least thirty-five stories since, several of them sf, the best known of them probably being "The Happy Man" (February 1991 Asimov's), which was included in The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (coll 1996). A more direct influence, which markedly distinguished him from his close contemporaries, was Stanisław Lem, as much later articulated in a long essay, "My Year of Reading Lemmishly" (10 February 2022 London Review of Books).
(1964- ) US author, married 1987-1998 to Shelley Jackson, who began publishing work of sf interest with "The Unexpurgated Zap Gun: A Report" for The Philip K Dick Society Newsletter #15 in 1987, the first of several pieces on Philip K Dick whose natural – though not inevitable – culmination was his editing for the Library of America three Dick omnibuses, beginning with Philip K Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (omni 2007) Lethem's own fiction, with the exception of his first novel, has only indirectly, though at times with considerable intensity, reflected this long-term interest.
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