Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem, whose gift for reviving and reinventing genres has been richly evidenced by Motherless Brooklyn and As She Climbed Across the Table, here takes the reader on a road trip through a post-apocalyptic USA. Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in the projection booth of the abandoned multiplex movie...

Girl in Landscape offers a genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of a new frontier. Jonathan Lethem's novel is a science-fiction Western that evokes both the brooding tragedy of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual precocity of Nabokov's Lolita. Lethem's heroine is 14-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently...

"A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit" - Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad. 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 - a laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in...

Lucinda Hoekke works at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. She becomes captivated by the ruminations of one particular caller, and they fall desperately in love. Lucinda also plays bass guitar in a struggling band whose lyricist, Bedwin, is suffering from writer's block, and whose lead singer, Matthew, has kidnapped a kangaroo from the local...

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto...

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 humour, 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...

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 humour, 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...

In Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, readers are introduced to Lionel Essrog, a private detective unlike any other. Nicknamed "the Human Freakshow," Lionel suffers from Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that forces him to shout out nonsense, touch every surface within reach, and compulsively rearrange objects. Despite these challenges, Lionel's unique perspective and unorthodox approach to life captivate from the...

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto...

In honour of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn - a beautifully published Everyman's Library hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America's most inventive novelists. Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog, is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to...

It's the summer of 1979. A 15-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...

From the funked-up, messed-up Brooklyn of the 1970s to the present day, this stunning novel spans thirty years in the life of two best friends, Dylan and Mingus, their families, and an entire neighbourhood. From their stories come the history of soul music, of graffiti art, of comic books, of experimented film and 'rock writing'. With a cast of more...

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—stops 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...