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Intelligence for Dummies

By Glenn O'Brien & Jonathan Lethem
Intelligence for Dummies by Glenn O'Brien & Jonathan Lethem digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

“Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader’s life.” --Michael Chabon

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O’Brien’s own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America.

Glenn O’Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets, to create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal aperçu into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat’s New York, and the culture of money that ensued. It also reveals O’Brien’s incisive and prescient understanding of America’s political culture, and of our current president.

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About Glenn O'Brien

Glenn O’Brien (1947-2017) was one of the most widely read and influential magazine writer-editors of the last fifty years and was a hall-of-fame copy - writer and creative director whose ads are ingrained in popular culture. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, O’Brien studied at Georgetown University and Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. After college, he joined Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, which he helped shape over his 20-year association. He wrote regular columns in publications including Artforum, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Paper, Purple, and Spin, and was widely read on the subjects of art, fashion, and music. Beloved as GQ’s “Style Guy”, his witty advice column was syndicated in GQ editions around the world. O’Brien’s wrote dozens of books, including 2011’s best-selling How to Be A Man, published in six countries.

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College.
He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger.
He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine.
His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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