If you’re a Lethem lover, get ready for a jolt of Jonathan. As you’d expect, the Motherless Brooklyn writer is appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival next week — on a panel about music writing and also alongside his fellow “literary lions,” Colson Whitehead and Jacqueline Woodson. Not only that, but the novelist and essayist is also featured in two new documentaries– and he’ll be appearing at a screening of one of them, to talk about all things Lethem.

Hello Hello Hello: Lee Ranaldo : Electric Trim
Sept. 15 at 7pm, Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University
, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ; tickets $12.
We told you about this one, documenting the making of Lee Ranaldo’s forthcoming album Electric Trim, when it premiered at the Montclair Film Festival. Thanks to the New Jersey Film Festival, it’s returning to Jerz, where the former Sonic Youth singer-guitarist recorded much of the album (Ranaldo is also doing an in-store at Rough Trade next week). In the 76-minute doc, Lethem, from his bucolic home in Maine, discusses how he came up with lyrics for some of the songs, partly by using scraps of writing that had long been in his desk drawer and partly by pulling from his book, A Gambler’s Anatomy. Director Fred Riedel and producer Jerry Fried will appear at the screening.

Lethem
Sept. 17 at Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St., Lower East Side; 7pm at tickets $15.
Fred Barney Taylor, who previously aimed his lens at sci-fi and fantasy writer and essayist Samuel R. Delany, returns with a documentary about one of Delany’s fans, Jonathan Lethem. Taylor and Lethem will both appear in person at this one-night-only screening. Lethem sees the writer’s life and work through the eyes of “those who have impacted the writer’s life, from his oldest friend, Michael Seidenberg, a bookseller whose bookshops were stocked with books that he would rather not sell; his younger brother Blake, a legendary graffiti writer; his father, Richard Brown Lethem, a well known painter; and his good friend Hampton Fancher, the past and future screenwriter of the Blade Runner films.” Lethem will also be signing copies of A Gambler’s Anatomy.