Performance Anxiety is my new memoir of adolescence in suburban Washington, D.C. It's about...closeted gay sex, exuberant radical politics, loud rock-and-roll, and looming adulthood in those years just before all hell broke loose in the multiple upheavals we now call "the sixties." Here's a clip from an interview I did about my early activism for the Woodstock Oral History Initiative.

THE HEADLONG ADOLESCENCE OF A MID-CENTURY KID

"Lerner uses an uncanny memory of things past plus relentless insight to reconstruct a mid-century America brimming with confidence, haunted by the ghosts of racism, and poised for big change. Performance Anxiety is smart, moving, tender, funny, tense, and deeply resonant."

           JEREMY VARON

           co-editor, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture

    More about the book.   Media reaction.

LILY NARCISSUS is Jonathan Lerner's recent novel about Americans in the Foreign Service in Asia during the Vietnam era.

"An Elegiac Tale of the Cold War Past...It is primarily in worldbuilding that the novel stands out. The world that Lerner summons up is remarkable precisely because he manages to make it feel so spectral and real at the same time."

                                    reviewed in the Taiwanese journal No Man Is an Island   

                                                                            More about LILY NARCISSUS.

My novels​ are  Lily Narcissus, Alex Underground and Caught in a Still Place. My previous memoir, Swords in the Hands of Children is about my experiences in the militant left in the sixties. I co-edited the oral history Voices from Wounded Knee.  For four decades I have been a magazine writer and editor, and am a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine, where my work addresses connections between the built and natural environments. Read a sampling of my recent articles here.