Books by Jonathan Lethem

Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist.

"A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving." —The Boston Globe

Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal.

But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston Globe * New Yorker * NPR * PopMatters
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.

Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston Globe * New Yorker * NPR * PopMatters
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.

The Feral Detective: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn
“One of America’s greatest storytellers.” —Washington Post

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe’s trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .
Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

The Feral Detective: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn
“One of America’s greatest storytellers.” —Washington Post

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe’s trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . .
Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

The Arrest: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.
The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . .
Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt.
Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.
Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

The Arrest: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.
The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . .
Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt.
Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.
Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form. “Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem’s stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay” (Chicago Tribune).
This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. A major new story, “The Red Sun School of Thoughts,” never published elsewhere, follows a teenaged boy coming to terms with figures of authority and power—those both in his own biological family and in the family he creates for himself.
Elsewhere we meet “Super Goat Man,” a down-at-heels bohemian superhero; “The Porn Critic,” whose accidental expertise wrecks his own romantic aspirations; and “Sleepy People,” who pose interpersonal conundrums without ever rousing from their slumber. Fluidly moving between realism and the surreal, the absurd and the mundane, A Different Kind of Tension is a container bursting with life and death, couples in trouble, talking animals, technologies on the fritz. Through it all are people longing to be seen and to connect; to thrive, love, and be forgiven. “This is the joy of reading Jonathan Lethem: you never know what you’re going to get” (Financial Times).

Gun, with Occasional Music (Harvest Book)

by Jonathan Lethem

A hard-boiled detective tale full of talking animals and murder, from the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest
Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems—there's a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.
Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse.
Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from a beloved author is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

A funny, inventive, and wholly original post-apocalyptic novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest
Meet Chaos, a young man who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.
It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.

The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

A striking short story collection from "one of the most unique and imaginative writers of his generation" (USA Today)
Welcome to the many and fascinating worlds of Jonathan Lethem's striking story collection: A dead man extends his stay on Earth in order to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell; basketball players wear suits that lend them the skills of old-time stars like Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain; a couple invites the avatars of all their old lovers to their engagement party as a last hurrah; and every time a man takes a lover, her world begins to unwind, until she loses her place in it completely.
In these and other stories in this collection, Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest and The Fortress of Solitude, draws the reader ever more deeply into his strange, unforgettable world—a trip from which there may be no easy return.

Chronic City (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.

A searing and wildly entertaining love letter to New York City from the bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude.

Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan. Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price.

"Full of dark humor and dazzling writing" --Entertainment Weekly

Dissident Gardens (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, The Globe and Mail

Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called “as ambitious as [Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan” (Los Angeles Times), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga.

Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her equally passionate and willful daughter, Miriam, flees Rose’s influence for the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. Despite their differences, they share a power to enchant the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her feckless chess hustler cousin, Lenny; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinger husband, Tommy Gogan; and their bewildered son, Sergius. Through Lethem’s vivid storytelling we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book
A Best Book of the Year —Austin American-Statesman

Includes a new, previously uncollected piece: "My Internet"

In The Ecstasy of Influence, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces—essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism—which also doubles as a novelist’s manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture.

As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has her boyfriend for nothing … nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice’s spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of Gun, with Occasional Music.
Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste—tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws—because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.

Girl in Landscape: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday

The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders.

Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE.

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.

"A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine

"One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time

You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art

Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting—and fall desperately in love.
Consumed by passion, Lucinda manages only to tear herself away from the Complainer to practice with the alternative band in which she plays bass. The lead singer of the band is Matthew, a confused young man who works at the zoo and has kidnapped a kangaroo to save it from ennui. Denise, the drummer, works at No Shame, a masturbation boutique. The band’s talented lyricist, Bedwin, conflicted about the group’s as-yet-nonexistent fame, is suffering from writer’s block. Hoping to recharge the band’s creative energy, Lucinda “suggests” some of the Complainer’s philosophical musings to Bedwin. When Bedwin transforms them into brilliant songs, the band gets its big break, including an invitation to appear on L.A.’s premiere alternative radio show. The only problem is the Complainer. He insists on joining the band, with disastrous consequences for all.
Brimming with satire and sex, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a funny and affectionate send-up of the alternative band scene, the city of Los Angeles, and the entire genre of romantic comedy, but remains unmistakably the work of the inimitable Jonathan Lethem.

The Disappointment Artist: Essays

by Jonathan Lethem

In a volume he describes as “a series of covert and no-so-covert autobiographical pieces,” Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession—in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these “voyages out from himself” have led him home—home to his father's life as a painter, and to the source of his beginnings as a writer. THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST is a series of windows onto the collisions of art, landscape, and personal history that formed Lethem’s richly imaginative, searingly honest perspective on life as a human creature in the jungle of culture at the end of the twentieth century.

From a confession of the sadness of a “Star Wars nerd” to an investigation into the legacy of a would-be literary titan, Lethem illuminates the process by which a child invents himself as a writer, and as a human being, through a series of approaches to the culture around him. In “The Disappointment Artist,” a letter from his aunt, a children’s book author, spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, and the uncomfortable fraternity of writers. In “Defending The Searchers” Lethem explains how a passion for the classic John Wayne Western became occasion for a series of minor humiliations. In “Identifying with Your Parents,” an excavation of childhood love for superhero comics expands to cover a whole range of nostalgia for a previous generation’s cultural artifacts. And “13/1977/21,” which begins by recounting the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times, “slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me . . . occult as a porn customer,” becomes a meditation on the sorrow and solace of the solitary movie-goer.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST confirms Lethem's unique ability to illuminate the way life, his and ours, can be read between the lines of art and culture.

The Disappointment Artist: Essays

by Jonathan Lethem

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces," Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession—from western films and comic books, to the music of Pink Floyd and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" has led him to the source of his beginnings as a writer. The Disappointment Artist is a series of windows onto the collisions of art, landscape, and personal history that formed Lethem’s richly imaginative, searingly honest perspective on life. A touching, deeply perceptive portrait of a writer in the making.

Chronic City: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.

Dissident Gardens: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.
As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.
Lethem’s characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is—at its mesmerizing, beating heart—about love.

A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face.

Handsome, impeccably tuxedoed Bruno Alexander travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur "whales" who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon. Fronted by his pasty, vampiric manager, Edgar Falk, Bruno arrives in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore. Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board sideways.

Things don't go much better in Berlin. Bruno's flirtation with Madchen, the striking blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game at the unsettling Herr Kohler's mansion goes awry as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing diagnosis. Having run through Falk's money, Bruno turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental surgery that might save his life.

Berkeley, where Bruno discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed never to return. Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira's come-ons and Keith's machinations, Bruno confronts two existential questions: Is the gambler being played by life? And what if you're telepathic but it doesn't do you any good?

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine stories that demonstrate his mastery of the short form.

Jonathan Lethem’s third collection of stories uncovers a father’s nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in “Pending Vegan”; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in “Traveler Home”; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in “Procedure in Plain Air”; and a crumbling, haunted “blog” on a seaside cliff in “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear.” Each of these locates itself in Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting. As in his celebrated novels, Lethem finds the uncanny lurking in the mundane, the irrational self-defeat seeping through our upstanding pursuits, and the tragic undertow of the absurd world(s) in which we live.
Devoted fans of Lethem will recognize familiar themes: the anxiety of influence taken to reductio ad absurdum in “The King of Sentences”; a hapless, horny outsider summoning bravado in “The Porn Critic”; characters from forgotten comics stranded on a desert island in “Their Back Pages.” As always in Lethem, humor and poignancy work in harmony, humans strive desperately for connection, words find themselves misaligned to deeds, and the sentences are glorious.

Kafka Americana: Fiction (Norton Paperback)

by Jonathan Lethem, Carter Scholz

"Inspired by affection.... Extremely witty and intelligent."―Publishers Weekly Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, Kafka Americana has achieved cult status. Norton now brings this reimagination of our labyrinthine world to a wider audience. In an act of literary appropriation, Lethem and Scholz seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, to muse on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial in which Kafka faces fraudulent charges. Taking modernism's presiding genius for a joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived.

The Best American Comics 2015

by Jonathan Lethem, Bill Kartalopoulos

“As I know well from my own field, true vitality consists of stuff that’s further off the radar of general acclaim. The influx of raw arrivals. The deep cuts.” —Jonathan Lethem, from the Introduction

Featuring Gabrielle Bell, Mat Brinkman, Roz Chast, Anya Davidson, Eleanor Davis, Jules Feiffer, Blaise Larmee, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Piskor, Joe Sacco, Esther Pearl Watson, and others.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of nine novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Gun, with Occasional Music, and most recently Dissident Gardens.

BILL KARTALOPOULOS is a Brooklyn-based comics critic, educator, curator, and editor. He teaches comics history at the School of Visual Arts. More information may be found at on-panel.com.

meeting_evil_a01

by Jonathan Lethem

"I envy your first encounter, if that is what it is, with Meeting Evil, one of Berger's most relentless and ingenious 'contraptions.'"
--Jonathan Lethem, from the Introduction
Meeting Evil tells an adrenaline-pumped, genuinely frightening tale of malevolence that swerves swiftly and irrevocably to a catastrophic climax.
John Felton meets evil late one Monday morning when the doorbell rings. Standing on the front porch is a stranger. He wears expensive running shoes and a baseball cap and calls himself Richie. He tells John his car has stalled and asks for help. An altercation at the gas station leads to a shocking crime as violence begets violence. At the end of this harrowing day, John returns home to find Richie ensconced in his living room, chatting up his wife. The evil has somehow seeped into his life. Thus begins the transformation of an unremarkable husband and father of two into a desperate man willing to go to any length to protect his family from the darkness that threatens them.
This is an extraordinary masterpiece and a chilling portrait of mounting menace played out against an everyday world of domestic routine, personified in a protagonist of basic decency grappling with both the immediate and existential meaning of true evil.

You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

"You have a unique viewpoint from which to write about Jack as no one else has or could write. I feel very deeply that this book must be written. And no one else, I repeat, can write it."--William S. Burroughs
Edie Parker was eighteen years old when she met Jack Kerouac at Columbia University in 1940. A young socialite from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she had come to New York to study art, and quickly found herself swept up in the excitement and new freedoms that the big city offered a sheltered young woman of that time.
Jack Kerouac was also eighteen, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together, sharing an apartment with Joan Adams (who would later marry William S. Burroughs). This is the story of their life together in New York, where they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. Edie's memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of the Beat Generation were first meeting and becoming friends.
In the end, Jack and Edie went their separate ways, keeping in touch only on rare occasions through letters and late-night phone calls. In his last letter to Edie, written a month before his death, Kerouac ended it with the encouraging phrase: "You'll be okay." It was from that note that the title of this book was taken.

This Shape We're In

by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem, author of the bestselling Motherless Brooklyn , returns in concentrated form - packing twice the adventure into one-eighth the pages. This book could be some kind of allegory book, but it might not be an allegory book at all. It involves people and drinking and people looking for a giant eye. It is among the best things Mr. Lethem has written.

Lucky Alan: and Other Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

A father tries to stave off a nervous breakdown when a family trip to SeaWorld shades into the sinister; a porn critic discovers that, despite his best intentions, his reputation—not to mention the stacks of smut lining his apartment—precedes him; an out-of-work avant-garde stage director begins to test his limits in the theater of life; desperate forgotten comic book characters find themselves suddenly stranded on a desert island.

With his celebrated wit and invention, Lethem brilliantly transforms the real into the surreal, uncovering the absurdity always lurking in the mundane, the twin forces of humor and tragedy that bracket experience, and the lasting desire—even in the face of all that goes awry—for human connection.

A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face.

Alexander Bruno travels the world playing high stakes backgammon and hunting for amateur “whales” who think they can challenge him. Lately he’s had a run of bad luck, not helped by the blot that has emerged in his field of vision, which forces him to look at the board sideways. As the blot grows larger, his game gets worse, until, at an opulent mansion in Berlin, he passes out in the middle of a match and receives an alarming diagnosis.
Out of money and out of friends, he turns to the only person who can help (and the last person he wants to see): a high-rolling former childhood acquaintance who agrees to pay for Bruno’s experimental surgery in Berkeley. But Berkeley is the place where Bruno discovered his psychic gift and where he vowed never to return. There, forced to confront patchouli flashbacks and his uncertain future, he must ask himself: Is he playing the game, or is the game playing him?

Men and Cartoons: Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

A boozy ex-military captain trapped in a mysterious vessel searches for his runaway son, an aging superhero settles into academia, and a professional "dystopianist" receives a visit from a suicidal sheep. Men and Cartoons contains eleven fantastical, amusing, and moving stories written in a dizzying array of styles that shows the remarkable range and power of Lethem's vision. Sometimes firmly grounded in reality, and other times spinning off into utterly original imaginary worlds, this book brings together marvelous characters with incisive social commentary and thought provoking allegories.

 A visionary and creative collection that only Jonathan Lethem could have produced, the Vintage edition features two stories not published in the hardcover edition, "The Shape We're In" and "Interview with the Crab.

You Don't Love Me Yet (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it's like to be young in Los Angeles. Lucinda Hoekke's daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line—an art gallery's high-minded installation piece—is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda's band begins to incorporate the Complainer's catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in.

Talking Heads' Fear of Music (33 1/3)

by Jonathan Lethem

It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music" - and everything spins outward from that one moment.

Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music (the third album by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics, packaging, downtown origins, and legacy, showing how Fear of Music hints at the directions (positive and negative) the band would take in the future. Lethem transports us again to the New York City of another time - tackling one of his great adolescent obsessions and illuminating the ways in which we fall in and out of love with works of art.

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

by Morgan Parker, George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Salman Rushdie, Aleksandar Hemon, Marlon James, Timothy Egan, Elizabeth Strout, Brit Bennett, Lauren Groff, Anthony Doerr, Neil Gaiman, Yaa Gyasi, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Cunningham, Jacqueline Woodson, William Finnegan, Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Andrew Sean Greer, Scott Turow, Meg Wolitzer, Hector Tobar, Sergio De La Pava, Rabih Alameddine, Victor LaValle, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, David Handler, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Steven Okazaki, Li Yiyun, Moses Sumney, C.J. Anders, Brenda J. Childs

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case.

On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue.

Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance.

These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted.

Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

by Morgan Parker, George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Salman Rushdie, Aleksandar Hemon, Marlon James, Timothy Egan, Elizabeth Strout, Brit Bennett, Lauren Groff, Anthony Doerr, Neil Gaiman, Yaa Gyasi, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Cunningham, Jacqueline Woodson, William Finnegan, Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Andrew Sean Greer, Scott Turow, Meg Wolitzer, Hector Tobar, Sergio De La Pava, Rabih Alameddine, Victor LaValle, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, David Handler, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Steven Okazaki, Li Yiyun, Moses Sumney, C.J. Anders, Brenda J. Childs

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case.

On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue.

Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance.

These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted.

Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z: A Library of America Special Publication

by Jonathan Lethem, Kevin Dettmar

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n’ roll legends

Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a recording session with Otis Redding; Ellen Willis traces the meteoric career of Janis Joplin; Ellen Sander recalls the chaotic world of Led Zeppelin on tour; Nick Tosches etches a portrait of the young Jerry Lee Lewis; Eve Babitz remembers Jim Morrison. Alongside are Lenny Kaye on acapella and Greg Tate on hip-hop, Vince Aletti on disco and Gerald Early on Motown; Robert Christgau on Prince, Nelson George on Marvin Gaye, Luc Sante on Bob Dylan, Hilton Als on Michael Jackson, Anthony DeCurtis on the Rolling Stones, Kelefa Sanneh on Jay Z.

The story this anthology tells is a ongoing one: “it’s too early,” editors Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar note, “for canon formation in a field so marvelously volatile—a volatility that mirrors, still, that of pop music itself, which remains smokestack lightning. The writing here attempts to catch some in a bottle.”

Also features:

NAT HENTOFF on BOB DYLAN
AMIRI BARAKA on R&B
LESTER BANGS on ELVIS PRESLEY
ROBERT CHRISTGAU on PRINCE
DEBRA RAE COHEN on DAVID BOWIE
EVE BABITZ on JIM MORRISON
ROBERT PALMER on SAM COOKE
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN on HEAVY METAL
JESSICA HOPPER on EMO
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN on AXL ROSE
ELIJAH WALD on THE BEATLES
GREIL MARCUS on CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers

by Jonathan Lethem

From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books

More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries.

Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick.

Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover’s shelf.

More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers

by Jonathan Lethem

From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books

More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries.

Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick.

Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover’s shelf.

The Collapsing Frontier (Outspoken Authors)

by Jonathan Lethem

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.
This collection compiles his intensely personal thoughts on the most interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people.
Plus…
“David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction” is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. “The Collapsing Frontier” and “In Mugwump Four” are fictions mapping ominous new realms. “Calvino’s 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History” is an intimate encounter with a legendary author. In “My Year of Reading Lemmishly” and “Snowden in the Labyrinth” he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results.
And Featuring: Our usual Outspoken Interview, in which Lethem reveals the secret subtext of his books, how he spent his MacArthur award money, and how a Toyota he owned was used in the robbery of a fast-food restaurant.

Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture (ZE Series, 5)

by Jonathan Lethem

A rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds.

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, “made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts” before diverting, at nineteen, to prose fiction. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates—and mourns—this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book.
Cellophane Bricks gathers a lifetime of Lethem’s art-writing, along with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere. Here we tour Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends; his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. More than just a compilation, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of Jonathan Lethem’s parallel life in visual culture—a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds, and an essential, singular brick to add to your own collection.

Motherless Brooklyn (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book

"Utterly original and deeply moving." —Esquire

Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal.

But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

They Live: A Novel Approach to Cinema (Deep Focus)

by Jonathan Lethem

“One of the cleverest, most accessibly in-depth film books released this year . . . a smart-ass novelist exploring a cheesy-cheeky ‘80s sci-fi flick.”—Hartford Advocate

Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult classics, and more . . . Kicking off the series is Jonathan Lethem’s take on They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 classic amalgam of deliberate B-movie, sci-fi, horror, anti-Yuppie agitprop.

Lethem exfoliates Carpenter’s paranoid satire in a series of penetrating, free-associational forays into the context of a story that peels the human masks off the ghoulish overlords of capitalism. Taking into consideration classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction—as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory—They Live provides a wholly original perspective on Carpenter’s subversive classic.

The Collapsing Frontier

by Jonathan Lethem

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.

This collection compiles his intensely personal thoughts on the most interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people.

Plus...

"David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction" is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. "The Collapsing Frontier" and "In Mugwump Four" are fictions mapping ominous new realms. "Calvino's 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History" is an intimate encounter with a legendary author. In "My Year of Reading Lemmishly" and "Snowden in the Labyrinth" he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results.

And Featuring: Our usual Outspoken Interview, in which Lethem reveals the secret subtext of his books, how he spent his MacArthur award money, and how a Toyota he owned was used in the robbery of a fast-food restaurant.