Annalee Newitz is working on a profile of Jonathan Lethem for Wired, and somewhere along the line, she got “the award-winning nerd novelist” to open up about slash, the mostly-amateur porn stories starring pop-culture icons and real-life celebrities that particularly flourish online. Acknowledging the presence of a Patricia Storms webcomic about him and Michael Chabon that’s “just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock,” Lethem admits he wouldn’t mind making further appearances in the genre, but declined to reveal preferred pairings: “I want to be surprised! I want to see ones I wouldn’t think of!”
As long as Newitz is taking suggestions for him, I might as well admit I’ve always been fond of this photo I took of Lethem and Christopher Sorrentino at last November’s National Book Awards ceremony… and though I don’t suppose we’d be able to get away with publishing any actual Lethem slash on this blog, that’s not to say I can’t throw some safe-for-work one-line plot summaries into the mix:
- It’s 2006, Judith Regan still works at HarperCollins, and she’ll do anything to steal Lethem away from Doubleday…
- Dazzled by Lethem’s masterful parrying of her confrontational interview technique, NYT magazine writer Deborah Solomon experiences feelings she’s never had on any other assignment…
- Upon meeting Jonathan Ames at a cocktail party, Lethem tells his literary colleague how he’s never been able to get certain scenes in I Pass Like Night out of his head, which leads to an impulsive cab ride back to Brooklyn…
Oh, wait, the Jonathan Ames thing is my fantasy… Um… well, anyway, if you think you’ve got a hotter story idea, we shiver with anticipation. Mind you, we’ll be screening them very carefully, what with our marked aversion to lawsuits—not that I think we have anything to worry about from Lethem, but who knows how other public figures might feel?