OVER THE PAST five years, Jonathan Lethem has established himself as one of the more inventive and idiosyncratic voices in contemporary fiction. His novels rework genres into deft hybrids, using worn tropes as a springboard to approach familiar themes -- love, family, city life -- in unexpected ways. In a literary market beset by fashionable para-metanarratives that sincerely interrogate their own irony, and vice versa, Lethem manages to handle ambiguous meanings without ever micromanaging them.  He earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for his last novel, Motherless Brooklyn -- a story of would-be mobsters told by one Lionel Essrog, perhaps the only narrator in the history of the novel to suffer from Tourette's syndrome. Lionel does his best to keep his story hard-boiled, but he often sails off into giddy riffs like this one: "Lexluthor, textlover, lostbrother, went my brain, plumbing up trouble." His story compels by subtly tracing the roots of the literary impulse to the compulsive, private languages we silently speak to ourselves.

Most recently, Lethem edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, an anthology of stories that collectively comprise a genre he calls "amnesia fiction." While cases of clinical amnesia are rare, memory loss is a common plot device in twentieth-century fiction and film. But, as Lethem relates in his introduction, these tropes are symptoms of a more deep-seated preoccupation: "an existential syndrome that seemed to nag at fictional characters with increasing frequency, a floating metaphor very much in the air."

The Vintage Book of Amnesia contains stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Donald Barthelme, Shirley Jackson, and many others. Devotees of the Museum of Jurassic Technology will be glad to find an "encapsulation" of the ideas of obliscence pioneer Geoffrey Sonnabend. The book also includes multiple dystopian captivity narratives, a malfunctioning artificial-memory generator, a neurosurgeon who begins to question his own sanity during an operation, and at least one narrator who may or may not be dead.

I spoke with Jonathan Lethem over the phone from his home in Toronto. (He also maintains a home in Brooklyn.) We talked about the relationship between language and memory, solipsistic forms of amnesia, and the importance of "moral" forgetting. Lethem was just wrapping up a book tour for Motherless Brooklyn and was eager to discuss something other than Tourette's. I'd meant to find out about his next project, but I got so caught up in our conversation that I forgot to ask him.