Alexandra Kleeman: Philip K. Dick’s “gnostic logic” and other influences on You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

You Too Can Have a
Body Like Mine by
Alexandra Kleeman
(Harper, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution from Alexandra Kleeman, whose just-published debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a seriocomic foray into consumerism and a uniquely contemporary kind of anomie, is drawing comparisons to DeLillo and Pynchon and, in the words of a Slate reviewer, “may be our best novel about the weirdness of being female in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies.” Below, Kleeman shares some of her formative influences as a writer.

VALIS, Philip K. Dick. People often think of Dick as a bad writer with an amazing set of concepts he’s trying to convey, but it’s not until you try to perform a Dickian act of narrative inversion or reality-shifting that you see how much skill and craft goes into what can look superficially like clunky writing. VALIS aims to make the reader perceive distinct entities as existentially or spiritually unitary—beneath surface differences lies a gnostic equivalence. Hence VALIS’s unfortunately-named protagonist Horselover Fat (an etymological equivalent for Philip K. Dick’s own name) can have a friend named Phil Dick, and later discover that he and Phil Dick are one and the same person. It would be easier (though still somewhat impossible) to tell this story from the outside, narrating and explaining this discovery. But Dick embeds you in Horselover Fat’s consciousness, forcing you to experience the contradictions of this gnostic logic as a visceral assault on your own individuality. It’s one of the strangest and most mysterious books out there, and I think it’s more radical in its structure than Pynchon or DeLillo because Dick allows not just inconsistencies but full-blown paradoxes to crop up in his world. The reader becomes a site for the resolution of these unresolvables, the effect often being that you find yourself thinking an impossible thing that you’ve never thought before, or experiencing something that feels like it could tear you in half.

Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth. This book takes the form a series of direct-address poems written on [the fast-food restaurant] Wendy’s comment cards—a uniquely modern constraint on composition if there ever was one. Shifting between exhortation, reflection, abuse, Wenderoth did a sort of postmodern take on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—you could call it “500 Ways That Wendy’s Looks Back at You.” Lines like “People eating toward eternity! People looking nice toward eternity! It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” abut vivid descriptions of ground meat and factory farming. Wenderoth challenges the idea that the American lyric voice died with the obsolesce of the circumstances and landscapes that gave birth to it originally: in his poems there are pathos, tenderness, rage, and above all 100% real emotion, not from concentrate. I first read these when I was eighteen, and they rooted in me a belief that the unexceptional suburban places that surrounded me were not boring and sterile even though they were built to be—there was ample emotion, only that emotion was made wilder and stranger because it couldn’t find a place to settle itself.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers. A slew of books and movies out there aim to represent the transitional point at which the world stops engaging with you as a girl and begins engaging you, whether you like it or not, as a woman. None of them do it as well as Carson McCullers does. Frankie Addams is a twelve-year-old tomboy who “wishes that people could change back and forth from boys to girls”—we follow her over the course of a few days as she fantasizes about leaving town with her brother and his new bride, who are due to get married and then go on a honeymoon. By the end of the book, she’s narrowly escaped a disturbing encounter with a soldier and has learned what the reader knew all along: Her life is fixed insofar as her gender is fixed. She’ll learn to navigate the world with her newly sexualized body, she’ll learn unpleasant lessons about other people, she’ll age and if she does leave town it’s likely to be through a conventional, gendered channel rather than the escape she had imagined with her brother and his new wife, in a role she had dreamed up herself. This is a dark book, but funny, and true to a form of becoming a woman that I’ve known myself.

Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
(Delacorte Press, 1973)

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is a good prescription for anyone who’s suffering from loneliness or sadness, which is why I read him in high school and why I consider him something like a personal friend to this day, even though obviously we never met. What he does so well in this book is depict people who are alone in their loneliness, together. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car salesman who’s on the brink of going insane and just looking for the right idea to fixate upon, Kilgore Trout is a published but more or less ignored author with a fictional premise that will end up driving Hoover mad. Threaded through their story are victims of racism and injustice, syphilitic microbes, cows and the hamburgers they are made into. From the perspective of narrator or reader, the sadness of each of these individual characters becomes visible as a sad but sympathetic web that connects us all invisibly. Even if the problems are terrible and unresolved, Vonnegut gives you a taste of what it’s like to empathize not just with individual others, but for the whole painful system.

Empathy, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This is the poetry that I open up whenever I want to feel calmer and wiser, or like I am with a calm wise friend whose emotions absorb me while allowing me to be myself, separate. These are intricately detailed etchings of an internal landscape, or a seismograph registering the peak and fall of one single emotional thread. Everything in them is an analogue for feeling, or every feeling in them is an analogue for unadulterated space and air and light. I love this book too much.

Though relations with oneself and with other people seem negotiated in terms secretly confirmed

by representation, her idea of the person’s visibility was not susceptible to representation. No matter

how emphatically a person will control his demeanor, there will be perspectives she cannot foresee or

direct, because there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which representation can reach,

the way part of a circle can be just the memory of a depth. The surface inside its contour,

like the inside of a body emits more feeling than its surroundings, as if

the volume or capacity of relations would only refer to something inside, that I can’t see,

that the other person and I keep getting in the way of, or things in the landscape while they are driving,

instead of the capacity being of your person. The volume of a bright cottonwood could be almost

a lack of volume or lack of space inside the tree, the way a membrane is the entrance of an organism.

—from “Honeymoon”

Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others, while her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Vogue has praised You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine as “Fight Club for girls,” while the Chicago Tribune called it “a satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Jabari Asim, Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Amitava Kumar, Adam Levin, Annie Liontas, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Jonathan Lethem on the “Exegesis” of Philip K. Dick

This month Houghton Mifflin publishes The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a massive tome of more than one thousand pages edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson. To create this volume the editors culled through some 8,000 pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches Dick spent the last years of his life obsessively reworking.

In his exclusive LOA interview about VALIS and Later Novels in 2009, Lethem described the “Exegesis”:

LOA: You mention in the Notes to the volume that Dick wrote VALIS in a “mere two weeks in November 1978, but its composition had a longer foreground” and that it incorporates material that Dick had “rehearsed in his ‘Exegesis’, an extensive journal project.” I gather that the “Exegesis” spanned some 8,000 pages upon Dick’s death. How does the material in it differ from what he includes in his novels? Is VALIS the only novel that includes work from it? Will all of it ever be published? 

Lethem: To take the simplest question first: VALIS is the only novel that includes language from the 8,000 (largely handwritten, unstructured, repetitive, digressive, and often dull) pages called the “Exegesis”—and, in their clarity and compression, these passages are far from typical of the whole. Some other (still comparatively “finished”) sequences from those pages are collected in In Pursuit of VALIS, edited by Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin. The challenges in organizing and transcribing the lion’s share of this material are being slowly approached by the Dick estate, with the help of some conservators and scholars, even as we speak. So, if you’re really excited about the prospect of reading the entirety, for the first time there’s a project to root for. But be warned: it shows no prospect of being some “lost masterwork,” nor even particularly readable.

Earlier this week Lethem spoke with John Hockenberry on NPR’s The Takeaway about the just-published selection from the “Exegesis” :

Lethem: This was literary detective work on a lot of levels. [Dick] left this stuff completely unsorted. There‘s no page numbering. You can’t put it in chronological order. Pamela Jackson took the brunt of this. She was the hands-on editor who really made some sense out of the chaos. It mirrors what Dick was doing in the writing. He’s trying to take the chaos of reality, of his experience of the universe, and put it in some kind of order, and mostly failing. The book represents an endless series of restarts. Every morning he gets up and thinks: no, no, no throw it all out. Here’s how everything works. He begins the book a hundred times. What we did was to try and embrace the best material, distill it, remove the repetitious stuff, and bring it into a framework where you could approach it. It’s not a book that reads like a narrative. It doesn’t get anywhere. It’s an endless meditation on existence. 

Hockenberry: In the end does that meditation give us a glimpse of a world far into the future that he imagined where we are headed? Or is it a look back at a life which in a sense might be sad and unfinished at the end? 

Lethem: It’s all of those things. It does have visionary sequences in it. You can take elements of this and project them into the most amazing and unwritten Philip K, Dick novels. It’s also very, very mournful and retrospective. In some ways it’s about a writer failing to grapple with his materials and drowning inside them on a daily basis. It’s brave but also kind of tragic. It’s also really quite a scholarly work. He was studying Aramaic. He was reading the Gnostic gospels. He was gathering every piece of material he could to try to bring to bear on the inklings he was having about the world. 

Hockenberry: Is there something you found in that treasure trove where you said “This guy is just a genius.” 

Lethem: There are lyrical flights in it where suddenly it becomes visionary, it becomes literary and you just see the writer taking over and the language soars. Those are the moments I live for as an editor.

Also of interest:

• PhilipKDick.com regularly posts new pages from the “Exegesis”
• Jonathan Lethem has done three LOA interviews about Philip K. Dick: on Four Novels of the 1960s, on Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s (with Dick's daughter, Laura Leslie), and on VALIS and Later Novels
• What Philip K. Dick learned about women from Ursula K. Le Guin, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The works of Philip K. Dick’s “Masterpiece Years,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (3-book boxed set)

Peter Israel on how he became editor of two science fiction classics by Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein

During the next year two landmark works of science fiction celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their publication. In June 1961 G. P. Putnam’s published Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which won the Hugo Award and became a cult classic. The following summer Putnam’s published The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, which won the subsequent Hugo Award and is considered by many to be, in the words of the New Statesman, Dick’s “most finely wrought work.” Both novels are famed for having been extensively reworked from their original manuscripts prior to publication—and both had the same editor: the young Peter Israel, who would go on to become president and chairman of Putnam’s. Here Israel offers his reminiscences of working with two legends.

Guest blog post by Peter Israel:

Phil Dick? Philip K. Dick? The Philip K. Dick? Now there’s a name out of my past! Let me explain. Once upon a time (as though in a galaxy far, far away), when—oh, say, a mere half-century ago—I was a wet-behind-the-ears editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and hungry for new authors, an enterprising young agent in Scott Meredith’s office, Henry Morrison, sent me a manuscript called The Man in the High Castle by a little-known writer, also young and aspiring. Although, as I learned, he’d already published several science fiction novels and tons of short stories, I’d never heard of the author.

At the time I was not a particular fan of the genre. True, we’d recently begun publishing one illustrious science-fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, but even that had come about in an odd way. Publishing science fiction in hardcover in the 1960s was a marginal proposition, the sales modest, limited mostly to libraries. The true market was in rack-sized, mass-market paperbacks, the readership mostly young. Even classics-in-the-making—I’m thinking, for example, of Frank Herbert’s Dune—had trouble finding a home in hardcovers. (Dune, which also won a Hugo, would finally be published in 1965 by Chilton, a publisher that specialized in automotive manuals!)

No matter. I was enthralled to discover The Man in the High Castle. Frustrated by it too. Gripping as its central concept was—what would life be like in America if the Axis powers had triumphed in World War II? (doubled, so ingeniously, by a “science-fiction” novel-within-the-novel which presupposed the opposite!)—the narrative seemed to wobble the further it went. The second half of the script, though highly readable (as Phil Dick’s work always was), hardly seemed to hold together.

No matter indeed. Wasn’t I, after all, the boy-genius editor, hungry for new talent? So we acquired the book for Putnam—the advance, I seem to remember, was on the order of $1,500—and set to work on a revision, particularly of that problematic second half. Far be it from me to remember the nuts and bolts of all the changes after all these years, but for once the author-editor collaboration bore fruit. At his end, Phil showed a remarkable ability to edit and rewrite his own work. I also think he was grateful to have found an editor who cared enough to go through the editorial process with him. At my end, I was convinced that if we could present the book as a thriller rather than as an exceptional genre novel, we might find a larger audience for this most interesting writer.

In this, of course, I was dead wrong, at least as far as sales of the hardcover in book stores were concerned. I doubt the net sale of our edition reached 1,500 copies, a decidedly money-losing proposition. On the other hand, the book was adopted by the Science Fiction Book Club, the paperback rights were sold (if for a modest advance), and the Hugo Award followed. In its Berkley paperback edition, the book has never been out of print, not even fifty years later. As for me, in my wisdom, I declined Phil’s next book, and he went on to write dozens of other works, all, alas, published elsewhere. But I am pleased to see his prolific, almost legendary career culminate, if posthumously, in the exalted sphere of The Library of America.

Meanwhile, I survived the publishing wars—in France and then again in the U.S.—and though I never did become a dyed-in-the-wool fan of science fiction, it was my privilege, ironically enough, to have published three of the great luminaries in the field: Phil Dick, Bob Heinlein, and Frank Herbert. The latter two, in later years, became personal friends, but Phil is the one I look back on still with a young editor’s pride and immense enthusiasm.

I mentioned above that Robert Heinlein landed at Putnam in an odd way. I might have said in an Alphonse-Gaston way. This is what happened. At the time Bob had two publishers—one for his adult novels, one for his juvenile. He submitted a manuscript which his adult publisher (I seem to remember it being Doubleday) said wasn't "adult" and which his juvenile (Scribner's maybe?) said didn't fit their category either. Perplexed, he and his agent then offered it to us. We said we didn't care what it was, we'd happily take it on, and its author with it. And so it came about. The book in question was Starship Troopers. It too has never been out of print.

Could I take this opportunity to set the record straight on one other aspect of my work with Bob? My protestations to the contrary, he always credited me with having come up with the title of his most famous work, Stranger in a Strange Land. This is what actually happened. When Bob’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, delivered that extraordinary manuscript to Putnam, it bore some impossible title. (It may have been something like The Heretic, but I seem to recall that “groking” was a part of it. At any rate, it simply wouldn’t do.) Now my editorial mentor, in those far-off days was our hugely gifted, if rather quixotic, editor-in-chief, Howard Cady, and Howard always kept a folder on his desk of “eligible” titles. That is, whenever he ran across a phrase or a quotation that, one day, might make an excellent title for this or that needy manuscript, he jotted it down and stuck it in the folder. And it was there, as I was grasping desperately for straws trying to find a substitute for the “groking” one, that I found Stranger in a Strange Land. So thank you, Howard, wherever you are. And Robert, kindly accept this belated corrective.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• The works of Philip K. Dick’s “Masterpiece Years”
• What Philip K. Dick learned about women from Ursula K. Le Guin
• Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (3-book boxed set)

The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

Over the weekend, Roger Ebert noted on Twitter that The Library of America’s first collection of Philip K. Dick fiction, Four Novels of the 1960s, is the “best-selling” title in the LOA’s history. Indeed, two years ago, we had publicized that the volume had sold faster than any other title during its first year of publication, and it is currently in its sixth printing, with more than 50,000 copies sold.

But, because it was published just four years ago, the volume has a way to go before it becomes the Library of America’s all-time best-selling title. We’re asked frequently what have been the most popular volumes in our history, and we thought we’d start off the New Year by publishing our top-ten titles, based on the total number of copies sold through all channels (including retail stores, book club sales, and our mail-order subscription program):

1. Thomas Jefferson: Writings [1984]                                   217,518
2. Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings [1982]                         150,973 
3. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches 1859–1865 [1989]                120,589
4. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches 1832–1858 [1989]                118,284
5. Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose [1982]                             114,790
6. Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, etc. [1985]        114,367
7. Debate on the Constitution: Part One [1993]                               112,273
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures [1983]            108,781
9. Robert Frost: Poems, Plays, & Prose [1995]                      106,772
10. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988]                   105,753

Philip K. Dick, still selling strong, is at #39 on the list. Other titles published during the last decade include The American Revolution [2001] at #24, H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005] at #31, and John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952 [2001] at #38.

All told, the 215 titles in the Library of America series total 222,020 pages (an average of 1,047 pages per volume), with over 8 million copies in print.

What Philip K. Dick learned about women from Ursula K. Le Guin

In a September talk at Portland Arts & Lectures Ursula K. Le Guin offered the oeuvre of Philip K. Dick as an example of how “you can’t judge quality by genre.” What she didn’t mention was her own influence on Dick’s writing—and his influence on her. Le Guin has long been a vocal advocate for Dick’s work and has acknowledged that her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven was strongly influenced by Dick’s sixties novels.

But in 1981 Le Guin and Dick (who would have turned eighty-two today—less than a year older than Le Guin) had a bit of a contretemps when writer Michael Bishop wrote Dick and quoted some disparaging comments Le Guin had made in a talk at Emory University about Dick’s obsession with “unresolvable metaphysical matters,” his sanity, and his portrayal of women. Dick responded by publishing a broadside in Science Fiction Review. Le Guin apologized in the same issue for upsetting Dick—but reaffirmed her critique of Dick’s women, especially in the novels preceding VALIS:

The women were symbols—whether goddess, bitch, hag, witch—but there weren’t any women left, and there used to be women in his books.

As Lawrence Sutin details in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, the two writers managed to patch up their difficulties through private letters—and Dick took Le Guin's criticism about his women to heart. The result:

In May 1981, upon completing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, with its loving portrait of Angel Archer, Phil would write to Le Guin in joy and triumph: “This is the happiest moment of my life, Ursula, to meet face-to-face this bright, scrappy, witty, educated, tender woman . . . and had it not been for your analysis of my writing I probably never would have discovered her."

In a Library of America interview about Philip K. Dick, Jonathan Lethem shared Dick’s enthusiasm for Angel Archer:

Certainly the narrator is one of his greatest characters, bar none, and the fact that she’s female is a real gift for those readers uncomfortable with Dick’s depictions of women even in some of his finest works (there are many of us).

Also of interest:

• Read the full interview with Jonathan Lethem about VALIS and Later Novels (which includes The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
• Read the Ballardian’s eightieth birthday tribute to Dick

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (3-book boxed set)

The works of Philip K. Dick’s “Masterpiece Years”

Today’s New York Times features an interview with Anne R. Dick, Philip K. Dick’s third wife, in connection with the publication of a new edition of her memoir, The Search for Philip K. Dick. During the five years Anne and Philip were married, from 1959 to 1964—what writer David Gill calls “Dick’s family man period”—Dick wrote many of his best-known works. Two of them, The Man in the High Castle (1962) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), are included in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s; three, Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), and Now Wait for Last Year (1966) appear in Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s.

Commenting on this time in Dick’s life, Jonathan Lethem, editor of all three LOA volumes of Dick’s works, told The New York Times: “It’s the most important passage of his career – more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.” He had much more to say in his first of three LOA interviews about Dick:

As absurd and surreal as the images and ideas in Dick’s books could sometimes be, he always took them seriously. The predicaments of his characters were never funny to him. They were overwhelmingly terrifying and important. That’s what makes him so distinct, not only from other science fiction writers, but also from other postmodern satirical writers that he could be associated with, writers like Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Richard Brautigan, all of whom also worked with absurdist and fantastic materials.

Dick commits to his visions with an emotional intensity unlike any other writer. He digs deeper and makes a life or death commitment to the situations in his novels. His books always have this doubleness. There’s a layer of satirical or fantastical inventiveness—he’s one of the great idea men of all literary history—but there’s also this personal emotional stake. He’s always putting everything he has at risk. The characters are deeply vulnerable, deeply flawed, and at the mercy of their situations. . .

If you had to pick a single decade to represent his work, the 1960s is the one to pick. That is the summit.

The Library of America interviewed Laura Leslie, the daughter of Anne and Philip K. Dick, in connection with the second LOA volume:

LOA: The works collected here were written between 1962 and 1977. What can you tell us about your father’s writing habits during that time?

Leslie: I can only tell you what my mother told me. She lived with my father from 1959 until 1963. My father liked to write at night and might write through the entire night, typing furiously. At that time he was writing so fast that he might finish a novel in as little as two weeks, writing night and day. Because my mother brought her three daughters with her into their marriage and my birth added a fourth, she wanted to have a more traditional family life where my father worked during the day and then joined her and the girls for a family dinner. At her urging, while they were married, he changed his writing habits to accommodate his new family life.

Of related interest:

• Read a 2009 interview with Anne R. Dick on io9
• Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, has also written a memoir, Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright. You can read an excerpt on her blog.
• Since August Suspend Your Disbelief has been blogging about how the movie adaptations of Dick’s works compare with the originals.
• Donald Fagen of Steely Dan recently revealed that PKD was an early influence

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (three-book boxed set).

Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth

Tomorrow, October 7, the Gotham Screen International Film Festival will open with the world premiere screening of Radio Free Albemuth, the new motion picture based on the posthumously published Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. Many thanks to Gabriel Mckee’s SFGospel blog for bringing this to our attention.

In an interview for The Library of America e-Newsletter in June 2009 Jonathan Lethem, the editor of LOA’s three Philip K. Dick volumes, addressed where Radio Free Albemuth fits among Philip K. Dick’s works:

Library of America: Some time over the next year a new movie, Radio Free Albemuth, starring Alanis Morissette, is due to be released. The movie is based on a novel Dick wrote before VALIS and originally entitled VALISystemA (it was published after his death as Radio Free Albemuth). The novel VALIS includes references to a science fiction movie “Valis,” which recapitulates the plotline of Radio Free Albemuth. Did Dick intend for all of these works to be intertwined? Can you help us sort the threads?

Jonathan Lethem: I’m not familiar with the movie project, apart from what you’ve heard, so I can’t predict how faithful or satisfying it might be for readers of VALIS or the other related works. The novel that the movie takes as its source, Radio Free Albemuth, is an odd duck in Dick’s shelf of published works in the sense that it was actually an earlier draft of the VALIS material, submitted for publication by Dick and then reworked so completely in the writing of VALIS that it appeared to his posthumous editors as a legitimate work of its own. It has champions—some who even prefer it to VALIS. I can’t agree, myself. It seems a fairly pedestrian and cautious feint at the material—readable, perhaps, but not essential. VALIS, meanwhile, is one of Dick’s great masterpieces, so I’m awfully glad that Radio Free Albemuth was written, if only to be rejected and rewritten.

Read the entire interview with Jonathan Lethem about Philip K. Dick: VALIS and Later Novels.

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (3-book boxed set)