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 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...

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 by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetit...

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 become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.Now, post-Arrest...

'A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit' Colson 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. She's looking for her friend's 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...

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 ...

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). He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urolo...

From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to...

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN IS RELEASED IN CINEMAS DECEMBER 2019'A detective novel of winning humour and exhilarating originality.' Sunday TimesLionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourette's Disease drives 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 mobst...

Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude) joins Judith Freeman and Rich Cohen in celebrating Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep.

“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 AdvocateDeep 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 ...

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...

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 title piece, a letter from his aunt (a children's book author) spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, the role and influence of reviews, 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 ...