Jonathan Lethem

El autor de Huérfanos de Brooklyn vuelve con una novela que desafía todas las convenciones del género. Un retablo apasionante sobre la historia de Brooklyn a lo largo de medio siglo. «Una historia ca

Bruno Alexander is a man with expensive problems.Sporting a tuxedo and trotting the globe, he has spent his adult life as a professional gambler. His particular line of work: backgammon, at which he extracts large sums of money from men who think they can challenge his peerless acumen. In Singapore, his luck turned.Maybe it had something to do with the Blot a black spot which has emerged to distort Brunos vision. Its not showing any signs of going away. In fact, its spreading, and as Bruno extends his losing streak in Berlin, it becomes clinically clear that the Blot is the symptom of something terrible. Theres a surgeon who can help, an elite specialist, the only one in the world. But surgery is going to involve a lot of money, and worse: returning home. To the land of bullying, psychosis and bad taste otherwise known as contemporary America.Specifically: the garish, hash-smoke streets Berkeley, California. Here, the unseemly Keith Stolarsky a childhood friend in possession of an empire of themed burger bars and thrift stores is king. And hes willing to help Bruno out. But there was always going to be a price.

Una comedia romántica ambientada en Los ángeles, con una peculiar banda musical como protagonista. Lucinda Hoekke, la bajista de un grupo de rock alternativo, trabaja durante el día como telefonista para una línea de atención al cliente. Un día decide conocer a uno de sus clientes, que lleva tiempo llamándola insistentemente a la línea de quejas para seducirla con sus palabras. De inmediato, se enamoran. Las ideas y frases de su novio inspiran el nuevo hit de la banda de Lucinda, pero la fama viene acompañada del acoso del novio, que insiste en formar parte del grupo y recibir los aplausos que le corresponden.

"A story of Manhattan as a city of falsehoods plays out in the friendship of a former child star and a polemicist with a mishmash of psychological problems. The characters are brilliantly developed, the plot is intricate but engaging, and Lethem pulls no punches. His best since Motherless Brooklyn -- excellent, excellent, excellent."

A New York Times top 100 Notable Book of the Year** Alexander Bruno is a man with expensive problems. Sporting a tuxedo and trotting the globe, he has spent his adult life as a professional gambler. His particular line of work: backgammon, at which he extracts large sums of money from men who think they can challenge his peerless acumen. In Singapore, his luck turned. Maybe it had something to do with the Blot - a black spot which has emerged to distort Bruno's vision. It's not showing any signs of going away. As Bruno extends his losing streak in Berlin, it becomes clinically clear that the Blot is the symptom of something terrible. There's a surgeon who can help, but surgery is going to involve a lot of money, and worse: returning home to the garish, hash-smoke streets of Berkeley, California. Here, the unseemly Keith Stolarsky - a childhood friend in possession of an empire of themed burger bars and thrift stores - is king. And he's willing to help Bruno out. But there was always going to be a price.

A fathers nervous breakdown during a visit to a theme park; a political prisoner confined to a hole in a busy New York street; a haunted 'blog' Welcome to Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting a place where the uncanny can be found lurking in the mundane, where humour and poignancy work in harmony, and a modern master of American letters entertains and dazzles us once again, as only he can.

As I know well from my own field, true vitality consists of stuff thats further off the radar of general acclaim. The influx of raw arrivals. The deep cuts.Jonathan Lethem, from the IntroductionFeaturing 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.

A fathers nervous breakdown during a visit to a theme park; a political prisoner confined to a hole in a busy New York street; a haunted 'blog' Welcome to Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting a place where the uncanny can be found lurking in the mundane, where humour and poignancy work in harmony, and a modern master of American letters entertains and dazzles us once again, as only he can.

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 in a struggling band whose lyricist, Bedwin, is suffering from writers block, and whose lead singer, Matthew, has kidnapped a kangaroo from the local zoo. Hoping to re-charge the bands creative energy, Lucinda suggests some of The Complainers philosophical musings to Bedwin, who transforms them into brilliant songs - with disastrous consequences. What results is a comedy of plagiarism, usurpation, and sex, with delightful echoes of Jane Austens Emma

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 reputationnot to mention the stacks of smut lining his apartmentprecedes 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 desireeven in the face of all that goes awryfor human connection.

The Arrest isnt post-apocalypse. It isnt a dystopia. It isnt a utopia. Its 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 become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didnt 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 hes 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.

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child whos 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 Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends square up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977 a white kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guys windscreen. And so it goes. On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change but the patterns remain the same: sex; boredom; friendship; violence; a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. But the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents; cops; renovators; landlords; gentrifiers; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighbourhood its name and control its shifting demographics. Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all... Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world weve made

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN IS RELEASED IN CINEMAS DECEMBER 2019A detective novel of winning humour and exhilarating originality.Sunday TimesLionel Essrog is Brooklyns very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettes Disease drives him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St Vincents Home for Boys, he works for mobster Frank Minna. But when Frank is fatally stabbed and his widow skips town, Lionel attempts to untangle the threads of the case.

The first novel by Jonathan Lethem (author of the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn) is a science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation.Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room, and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea). Hes been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love with her a little at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitors Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

Girl in Landscape offers a genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of a new frontier. Jonathan Lethems novel is a science-fiction Western that evokes both the brooding tragedy of John Fords The Searchers and the sexual precocity of Nabokovs Lolita.Lethems 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 discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella embarks on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences - both for the humans in her community, and also for the mysterious and passive indigenous inhabitants, The Archbuilders.

Jonathan Lethem, acclaimed author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, here takes the reader on a road trip through a post-apocalyptic USA.Since the war came and the bombs fell, Hatfork, Wyoming, has been a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in the projection booth of the abandoned multiplex cinema, trying to blot out his present, but unable to remember his past. Then, over a can of dog food, the local tyrant Kellogg reveals to Chaos that those bombs never actually fell. The truth, in fact, is a little more complicated . . .So Chaos gets behind the wheel of an automobile and, accompanied by a fur-covered mutant female, sets out onto the empty highway for a journey to the edge of his American nightmare: in search of a missing identity and a stolen love.

A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethems trademark verve and witColson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground RailroadPhoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. Shes looking for her friends missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist - a laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer - 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. Phoebes trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous...Jonathan Lethems first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.