Arts and Letters: Jonathan Lethem
About
Join us at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort for a very special edition of UCR Palm Desert’s acclaimed Arts & Letters lecture series as we welcome one of America’s most treasured writers, Jonathan Lethem, for an intimate conversation with another of our most treasured writers, Ivy Pochoda. Lethem will be discussing his latest book, A Different Kind of Tension: New & Selected Stories, followed by a book signing. Seating is limited to 100 guests. About A Different Kind of Tension: A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form. “Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger,” says the Chicago Tribune of this dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem, which features seven major new stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. “This collection of new and selected stories spans thirty-five years of Lethem’s career and is a testimony to his beguiling exploration of the possibilities of the short story,” the New Yorker raved. “Mastery is evident in one story after another.” Saturday June 6, 2026 8 P.M. Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa 45000 Indian Wells Ln. Indian Wells, CA 92210 BIOS Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Brooklyn Crime Novel, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His five story collections include Men and Cartoons and Lucky Alan, and his short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the Paris Review, among other publications, garnering a Pushcart Prize, a World Fantasy Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Los Angeles and Maine. Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, Ecstasy, and Sing Her Down which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She’s also won the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, among other awards, and her short fiction has been selected for Best American Mystery & Suspense. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program.