Where Philip K. Dick had come from, for me, was my best friend’s Jake’s dad, Harry. Harry was younger than Jake’s mom, and when they divorced, as everyone’s parents seemingly did, Jake’s mom retained the family home, the upstanding parental postures – in fact, she was one of the most reliable parents around if, in those prodigious slippery days in our unreliable neck of the woods, you were looking for someone to chide or encourage you or make you a sandwich, as if you were still a younger child. We counted on her for that.

“I wanted to write books exactly like the ones he didn't live long enough to write.” Lethem on Philip K. Dick

“March 3 and March 4: Philip K. Dick is undoubtedly one of the greatest Gnostic visionaries and literary giants in all of history. Much of what Dick wrote or accurately predicted was channeled by a series of disturbing mystic events in the early seventies. He received Gnosis by various means from entities beyond reality, and his astral ideas still grip the imagination of the world. Yet what Dick revealed in his books and notes was only a fraction of his visions and theological insights. He actually wrote thousands of pages that were kept away from the general public, even decades after his death. Until now. We discuss the earth-shattering findings with a member of the editorial team. We discover more secrets of the visible and invisible cosmos; and also realize that it will take years to properly decipher what is more than an arcane religious text but living, holy information itself that might free the spirit of humanity once and for all.

While mainstream literary figures sometimes praise their fellow writers, rarely do they present themselves publicly as hardcore pop culture fans. Since the publication of his novels Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, as well as his reception of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, Jonathan Lethem has become a successful and widely-praised author of playful and intelligent literary fictions. He has also become probably the most visible fan and proponent of the science fiction of Philip K. Dick. A few years ago, Lethem was commissioned by the august Library of America to edit a volume of Dick‘s writings for the publisher‘s definitive canon of American letters. The initial volume, Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s was the best-selling title out of the gate in the history of the library, and two more Lethem-edited volumes of Dick‘s work followed (Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s and Philip K. Dick: VALIS and Later Novels).

Lethem began his own writing career d

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia.