Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

There's a famous line from a Bob Dylan song that goes,

She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back.

As a person who loves art, music and literature especially, I've always been

haunted by that line. Does an artist really not look back? Is looking back somehow a threat

to creativity? What about Proust? Did he ever look anywhere but back? My guest today is

Jonathan Letham, one of my very favorite writers since I read his early novel Fortress of

Solitude. He's also the author of Motherless Brooklyn, Dissident Gardens, and many more books.

Leitham is an artist who experiments and explores playing with forms and genres and trying on

different masks, but he also spends a lot of time rummaging through the stacks,

unearthing things that are lost or forgotten. His latest book is more alive and less lonely,

a collection of essays about books and reading. Welcome to think again, Jonathan.

Thanks for having me along. I like that The Fortress of Solitude gets to be an early book now.

I mean, it was like a middle book for a long time, but I think I'm getting so old that

it's an early book.

Well, it was early to me.

That was when you came to my attention.

But you'd written, how many had you did you have before that? That was my sixth

novel. Wow. But, you know, it's kind of true. I mean, this goes right to your whole don't look

back thing is, you know, I'm amazed at how long you get to live and how much you become a bridge

to the, basically to the dead past.

But it's alive in your brain.

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