Julianna Baggott, Author, Jonathan Lethem, Author, Tom Perrotta, Author MTV Books $25.99 (436p) ISBN 978-0-7434-7026-1
Writers pay homage to rockers in Lit Riffs, a collection of 24 stories inspired by songs. Edited by Matthew Miele, the book features a familiar list of hip young literary lights offering good-but perhaps not their best-work. Jonathan Letham,...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Doubleday Books $23.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-49183-9
Hard-boiled crime fiction has never seen the likes of Lionel Essrog, the barking, grunting, spasmodically twitching hero of Lethem's gonzo detective novel that unfolds amidst the detritus of contemporary Brooklyn. As he did in his convention-smashing
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Jonathan Lethem. Ecco, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-285906-8
Lethem hits a wall in his forgettable latest (following A Gambler’s Anatomy). Phoebe Siegler, a consummate New Yorker, travels to the Mojave Desert in search of Arabella, a friend’s missing daughter and an 18-year-old dropout of Reed College. She...
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Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, $27.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-385-53990-6
In this pleasantly bizarre novel from Lethem (Lucky Alan), a down-on-his-luck backgammon hustler returns to his hometown of Berkeley, Calif., to undergo experimental facial surgery. After a cold streak in Berlin, telepath Alexander Bruno learns of a
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Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, $24.95 (176p) ISBN 978-0-385-53981-4
In Lethem’s collection, following the novel Dissident Gardens, the stories use absurdity, satire, or incongruity to contrast the quotidian. A bookstore clerk and his girlfriend obsess over the cadence and precision of language, stalking the...
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Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, $27.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-385-53493-2
While collective memory might offer some hazy grasp of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists, all but forgotten is the real American Communist Party and its Depression-era heyday. In this epic and complex new novel, Lethem considers what happened
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Doubleday Books $22.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-385-48518-0
A surrealistic bildungsroman about a teenage girl unfolds among the ruins and frontier violence of a distant planet in Lethem's latest genre-bending exploration of science, landscape and the metaphysics of love and loss. As the novel opens, Pella...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Doubleday Books $22.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-385-48517-3
A poser of warped, philosophical conundrums whose witty, genre-bending novels are set in dysfunctional worlds of the present and near-future, Lethem (Gun, with Occasional Music) situates his fourth novel on the fictional campus of a Northern...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author . Doubleday $26 (528p) ISBN 978-0-385-50069-2
If there still remains any doubt, this novel confirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $23 (0p) ISBN 978-0-15-100180-4
Although Lethem is claimed by the science fiction community as one of its own--last year, Locus magazine bestowed its Best First Novel award on his Gun, with Occasional Music--this relative newcomer's extraordinary work is really extra-genre, in the
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $20 (247p) ISBN 978-0-15-100091-3
Lethem's post-apocalyptic vision reflects American culture as if in a funhouse mirror in this strong follow-up to Gun, with Occasional Music. Televangelists have become actual robots, dog food is the cuisine of choice and the soap operas star...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Tor Books $12.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-85878-0
Lethem's first novel is a work of noir science fiction inhabited by animal gangsters and a gritty futuristic P.I. (Mar.)
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Jonathan Lethem, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P $19.95 (262p) ISBN 978-0-15-136458-9
Chandleresque, hard-boiled detective narrative finds a quirky new milieu in this SF/mystery/farce of murder and mass mind control set in a near-future Oakland, Calif. Conrad Metcalf is a private dick, but in his era that profession is even more...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author . Doubleday $27.95 (467p) ISBN 978-0-385-51863-5
Signature
Reviewed by
Arthur Nersesian
Jonathan Lethem's work has gone from postapocalyptic sci-fi to autobiographical magical realism. In Chronic City
, he weaves these elements together, blending a number of actual recent events to create...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author . Doubleday $24.95 (223p) ISBN 978-0-385-51218-3
Lethem (Fortress of Solitude
; Motherless Brooklyn
; etc.) strays from hometown Brooklyn to recount the near-fame experience of a Los Angeles alternative rock band. Its success depends on bass guitarist Lucinda Hoekke, an unwitting femme fatale...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author . Doubleday $22.95 (160p) ISBN 978-0-385-51217-6
Novelist Lethem's new collection of essays starts with an intriguing, if emotionally distant, consideration of his lifelong relationship with popular culture and develops into a moving memoir that transcends those references altogether. As the...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author . Doubleday $19.95 (176p) ISBN 978-0-385-51216-9
Like Lethem's bestselling novel The Fortress of Solitude,
this collection blends the literary with the fantastical, probing themes of loneliness, failed relationships and the consequences of strange powers. These nine stories, starring comic...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author, Carter Scholz, Joint Author Subterranean Press $40 (102p) ISBN 978-1-892284-43-3
Kafka is not only an icon of disquiet, but a symbol of writerly dedication, the patron saint of tortured scribes everywhere. Thus, the very funny spoofs and ""alternate"" Kafkas presented in this short collection by Lethem and Scholz are inspired by
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Jonathan Lethem, Author, Jonathan Lethem, Read by, Various, Read by , read by the author, Tim Blake Nelson, Kevin Corrigan et al. Random House Audio $16.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-7393-1489-0
Audio reviews reflect PW
's assessment of the audio adaptation of a book and should be quoted only in reference to the audio version.
Fiction
MEN AND CARTOONS: Stories
Jonathan Lethem
, read by the author, Tim Blake Nelson, Kevin Corrigan et al.
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Jonathan Lethem. Melville House, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-161219-603-9
The title of Lethem’s varied collection of book reviews, introductions, and literary essays will surely resonate with any dedicated reader. Curious and adventurous readers will find a plethora of reading suggestions as Lethem (A Gambler’s Anatomy)...
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Jonathan Lethem, read by Mark Bramhall. Random House Audio, unabridged, 13 CDs, 16.5 hrs., $50 ISBN 978-0-307-94089-6
Lethem’s new novel, fast in pace and large in theme, takes place in the confines of the planned community of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, and follows the devolution of a family of female radicals. There is matriarch Rose, exiled from her communist...
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Jonathan Lethem, Author, Steve Buscemi, Read by HarperAudio $25 (0p) ISBN 978-0-694-52364-1
This entertaining play on the hardboiled detective tale features an unlikely gumshoe with Tourette's syndrome, which compels him to count, tap and make strange vocalizations at inopportune moments. Such ticks could seem gimmicky, but Lethem writes...
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Edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Avid Reader, $27 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5011-9040-7
Husband and wife Chabon (Moonglow) and Waldman (A Really Good Day) gather dozens of prominent writers to commemorate the ACLU’s centennial with powerful, inspiring essays on the legal organization’s milestone cases. Addressing City of Chicago v....
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Jonathan Lethem. Ecco, $27.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-293878-7
Lethem (The Feral Detective) returns with a lukewarm tale of an apocalypse set in the very near future. Sandy Duplessis worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles with his friend Peter Todbaum. Then came the Arrest, an unexplained event that caused...
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Jonathan Lethem. Ecco, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-293882-4
The parts are better than the whole in Lethem’s textured if scattershot latest (after The Arrest), an episodic look at crime in a Brooklyn neighborhood from the 1930s through 2019. The first chapter, “Quarters, Part 1,” set in 1978, features two 14-y
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Jonathan Lethem. ZE, $40 (416p) ISBN 979-8-9886700-0-1
Novelist Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel)shares an entrancing collection of stories and essays celebrating visual art. The author, who flirted with painting in college before “plung[ing] into the etheric realm of language,” opens the volume with 12...
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Jonathan Lethem. Ecco, $29.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-338884-0
Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel) offers a revelatory career-spanning collection of 30 fantastical and speculative stories, all but 11 of which have appeared in previous volumes. Among the often-melancholy characters are “Sleepy People” protagonist...
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ARTICLES
