We were recently lucky enough to speak with Jonathan Lethem.

The author of (among other books) Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude and the new short-story collection Men and Cartoons was recently in the news for winning a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as a “genius grant") for $500,000 in recognition of his work.

On Wednesday, December 7, Lethem will be appearing at Makor along with author Elissa Schappell for a reading and a discussion of the short story form.

After the jump, we speak with Lethem about writing, comics and the Mets.

You’ll be discussing your new short story collection at Makor. What do you think the appeal of the short story is?

Well, I came to short stories sort of second. I was a novel reader and growing up, when I imagined myself becoming a writer, it was novels I wanted to create. I still think in some ways I am more instinctive and natural as a novel writer. It’s more digressive and expansive. I like the complexity and the layers but stories are kind of, you know, more than smaller units of fiction.

Because they’re smaller, the beginning, middle and end are all closer together and you can look at them whole and in that way they are akin to a poem, song or a painting. You can back up and consider them as an object and finished work that you can contemplate in their entirety, while novels wrap you up in their world and no one can see the whole structure. Even the writer, when they’re writing a novel, is lost inside this labyrinth.

As you become a fiction writer, I think in many ways the short story becomes more interesting to you because it’s a writer’s form where the plastic properties of fiction are made visible. You can think about certain kinds of effects and the ways endings work and you can achieve maximum compression.

Another way of putting this is: They’re perfectable and novels aren’t. There is always something wrong with the the greatest of novels and often there are hundreds of things wrong with even very wonderful novels, because they’re just too varied and inclusive to ever be perfect. But you can think as a short-story writer that you’re going to make them perfect.

In Men and Cartoons, the stories range from science fiction to stories about superheroes to—for lack of a better term—straight-up fiction. Do you find the process different when you’re writing different genres?

Well, no. I think my creative process is pretty similar once I latch on to a strategy and an idea for a story—a point of view and a voice to tell it in. The experience for me as a writer is pretty similar. Of course, every story in the book is a combination of those things you named, rather than one or the other and that’s typical of my work.

But it’s not highly quarantined in terms of genre or method—I tend to use a lot of different strategies in the same place. You know, most of those stories have a similar mongrel quality where some piece of a fantasy or science fiction image is embedded in an otherwise realistic narrative.

Actually, we’ve got a completely non-writing related question for you. You’re a Mets fan, right?

Yep.

What did you think of them last season?

I was totally involved. I haven’t watched a Mets season so closely in years because when they hired Randolph and we said goodbye to Steve Phillips and Omar Minaya came in, the nature of some of the younger players who are coming up—it really feels like it is possible to root for them and not totally be rejected and tormented by the institutional mediocrity (you know, the Steve Phillips/Art Howe version of the Mets).

So I was thrilled though at certain points I had my expectations set too high. I thought we really might steal that wild-card spot. But things are extremely promising for next year and I have no complaints. They were beautiful to watch this year, except for a horrible excuse for a closer.

In Men and Cartoons, there’s a lot of comic-book nostalgia. Were you more of a Marvel fan or a DC fan growing up?

Certainly more of a Marvel fan. I read them both and of course the great DC characters are lodged in my brain—they’re so archetypal. Batman, Superman—they are really part of my vocabulary. But as a reader of comic books, at the peak of my interest around the age of 13 and 14, Marvel’s comics seemed much deeper and more mysterious to me, even though at that point, in the mid ‘70s, it was not what many people regard as a high point for Marvel.

Still, the aura of the great ‘60s characters was still strongly detectable from reprints, Stan Lee books and the origins books. So I was a Marvel guy all the way.

In The Believer, you interviewed Paul Auster. What was that experience like?

I’m lucky enough now to have a friendship with Paul so as an experience it was the slightly odd one of taking a conversation that you might have casually or accidentally with a friend and taking a tape recorder, opening a bottle of wine and trying to do it deliberately.

But it worked out very nicely, we actually had a lovely afternoon together so something that might have been self-conscious or deliberate turned out well. I felt fortunate.

What are your feelings about all the changes that have taken place around Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Smith Street over the past 10 years?

Well, I face that question fairly frequently now and it’s one that I’m helpless to answer quickly or easily. In a way, Fortress was written in the way it was written and with so many contrasting points of view because I was puzzling over my feelings about Brooklyn and its fate and the differences between the Brooklyn I knew as far back as the early 1970s and the Brooklyn I live in now.

I guess that’s to say my feelings about the gentrification and the kind of… Brooklyn boom [that’s going on] are kind of ambivalent in the true sense of ambivalence, where I feel strongly opposed emotions. The place in many ways seems to be coming into its own and I’d be hypocritical if I didn’t feel I enjoy the benefits of that living here and yet there’s a kind of sadness or undertow of sadness to the way that certain other things have been lost here.

Yet as I look more and more closely at this place and at my own feelings about it, I come to see a sense of it as a place that was sort of ruined or overturned or taken away pervaded my feelings about Brooklyn even back in the 1970s, and I feel there’s something intrinsically kind of ruined about Brooklyn or being tragic in its understanding or myth of itself. To mourn is part of what it is to live here.

Do you find it different writing about New York when you’re outside of New York as opposed to when you’re in the city?

Well, I think people would sometimes be surprised to learn how much of the two Brooklyn novels were not written here.

I was on the road a lot in the years when I wrote Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude and I often thrive on writing about the city from a distance. There’s something about the slight feeling of exile that brings my imaginative relationship with this place to life.

And practically speaking, it’s a heck of a lot easier for me to write when I’m not in the city because I’m as prone to the temptations of this place as anyone, and on top of that, I’m beginning to have this odd public life here which is very gratifying but doesn’t give me the kind of privacy a writer needs. So I depend on being away from here, actually, even when New York is my subject matter.

Tickets for The Seduction of Stories: A Reading featuring Jonathan Lethem are currently available.