Books by Jonathan Lethem

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 mobster Frank Minna. But when Frank is fatally stabbed and his widow skips town, Lionel attempts to untangle the threads of the case.

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

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, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn

Following in the footsteps of the late great Lester Bangs -- the most revered and irreverent of rock 'n' roll critics -- twenty-four celebrated writers have penned stories inspired by great songs. Just as Bangs cast new light on a Rod Stewart classic with his story "e;Maggie May,"e; about a wholly unexpected connection between an impressionable young man and an aging, alcoholic hooker, the diverse, electrifying stories here use songs as a springboard for a form dubbed the lit riff. Alongside Bangs's classic work, you'll find stories by J.T. LeRoy, who puts a recovering teenage drug abuser in a dentist's chair with nothing but the Foo Fighters's "e;Everlong"e; -- blaring through the P.A. -- to fight the pain; Jonathan Lethem, whose narrator looks back on his lost innocence just as an extramarital affair careens to an end -- this to the tune "e;Speeding Motorcycle"e; as recorded by Yo La Tengo; and Jennifer Belle, who envisions a prequel to Paul Simon's "e;Graceland"e; -- one that takes place at a children's birthday party replete with a real live kangaroo. With original contributions from Tom Perrotta, Nelson George, Amanda Davis, Lisa Tucker, Aimee Bender, Darin Strauss, and many more -- riffing on everyone from Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen to the White Stripes, Cat Power, and Bob Marley -- this is both an astounding collection of short stories and an extraordinary experiment in words and music. Soundtrack available from Saturation Acres Music & Recording Co.

A father's nervous breakdown during a visit to a theme park; 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.

In 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed. It wasn't the first time, and it wasn't the last. In fact, Rose - like all American Communists - got screwed by the entire twentieth century. She doesn't take it lying down. For over forty years she pounds the streets of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, terrorising the neighbourhood, and her family.

Offers an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring and Marlon Brando. This book simmers with direct challenges to conventional wisdom and deep insights into the kaleidoscopic nature of artistic vision, and the way the author's own experiences have fuelled his creative passions.

A virtuoso performance by a writer at the peak of his powers, tackling one of his great obsessions: Talking Heads.

Announcing the third annual collection of the year's best essays and articles on music. It's "music-geek rapture."-Entertainment Weekly

What if your lover left you for nothing? Literally Nothing? From the author of Motherless Brooklyn, this is a strange, hilarious love story about a man, a woman, and the space between them. Physicist Alice Coombs has made a great discovery - a hole in the universe, a true nothingness she and her colleagues call 'Lack'. Professor Philip Engstrand has made his own breakthrough - he realises how much he loves Alice. Trouble is, Lack is a void with a personality - a void that utterly obsesses Philip's beloved. She's fallen out of love with Philip and in love with Lack.

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 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.

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 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 Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

‘Dissidentparken’ er den amerikanske forfatter Jonathan Lethems beretning om modkulturen i USA gennem det sidste trekvarte århundrede. Den er bygget op som en familiesaga over tre generationer. Rose Angrush er polsk jøde og kommunist og emigrerer som ung til USA i 1930’erne. Rose bliver kaldt Sunnyside Gardens røde dronning og er en karismatisk furie, som terroriserer omgivelserne med sine kompromisløse holdninger og sit skarpe intellekt. Hendes lige så begavede og viljestærke datter Miriam flygter fra sin mors indflydelse og bliver en del af den gryende modkultur i Greenwich Village, hvor hun danner par med folkesangeren Tommy Gogan. Sammen får de sønnen Sergius, som de forlader, mens han er spæd, for at slutte sig til sandinisterne i Nicaragua. Sergius forsøger som voksen at nå til en forståelse af sin familiemæssige baggrund. Undervejs i sin søgen stifter han bekendtskab med occupy-bevægelsen og finder måske derved en tråd i sit liv, som forbinder ham med sin familie. "Så ambitiøs som Mailer, så morsom som Philip Roth og så skarp som Bob Dylan … ‘Dissident­parken’ viser Lethems fulde beherskelse af sit talent som romanforfatter, sådan som han ubesværet glider fra historiske perioder til indre verdener … vidende, velskrevet, vis, empatisk, hjertegribende og næsten blottet for nostalgi." Los Angeles Times