Sep 13, 2023
Writer Jake Lamar talks about growing up in the Bronx, his
lifelong love affair with writing, moving to France in the 90s, his
career as a novelist, playwright, and cultural critic in Paris, and
his new book Viper’s Dream, a Jazz Noir crime novel
set in the jazz world of Harlem between 1936 and 1961.
After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years
writing for Time magazine. He has lived in Paris since 1993 and
teaches creative writing at Sciences Po. At age 30, he
published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he
evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the
Lyndhurst Prize.
In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James
Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he
still resides. In 1996 he published The Last
Integrationist, a novel of contemporary America, criticizing
the pace of racial integration and the omnipresent television
spectacle he sees as typical of the United States. He is the author
of a memoir, seven novels, numerous essays, reviews and short
stories, and a play.
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