Bøker av Jonathan Lethem

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.

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 rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

A rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds. Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels--Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others--play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father's studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, "made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts" before diverting, at nineteen, to prose fiction. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates--and mourns--this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem's writing, is the subject of this book. Cellophane Bricks gathers a lifetime of Lethem's art-writing, along with stunning, full-color images from the author's own collection and elsewhere. Here we tour Lethem's fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends; his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. More than just a compilation, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of Jonathan Lethem's parallel life in visual culture--a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds, and an essential, singular brick to add to your own collection.

From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping and prismatic story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing over fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.

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 original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people.Plus…“David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction” is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. “The Collapsing Frontier” and “In Mugwump Four” are fictions mapping ominous new realms. “Calvino’s 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History” is an intimate encounter with a legendary author. In “My Year of Reading Lemmishly” and “Snowden in the Labyrinth” he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results.And Featuring: Our usual Outspoken Interview, in which Lethem reveals the secret subtext of his books, how he spent his MacArthur award money, and how a Toyota he owned was used in the robbery of a fast-food restaurant.

Jonathan Lethems first detective novel since Motherless BrooklynOne of Americas greatest storytellers. Washington PostPhoebe 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 to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious troublecaught 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.

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detectiveand Motherless Brooklyncomes an utterly original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.The Arrest isnt post-apocalypse. It isnt a dystopia. It isnt a utopia. Its just what happens when much of what we take for grantedcars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for startersquits 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 Arrestis speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn

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.

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.

Includes interviews between legendary "Rolling Stone" journalist Paul Nelson and Clint Eastwood who has forged a remarkable career as a movie star, director, producer and composer.

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

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 writer's block, and whose lead singer, Matthew, has kidnapped a kangaroo from the local zoo. Hoping to re-charge the band's creative energy, Lucinda 'suggests' some of The Complainer's 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 Austen's Emma

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.

Jonathan Lethem again displays his brilliance in this collection of seven short stories, blurring the boundaries of sci-fi, mystery, and thriller. Tales include 'Light and the Sufferer', in which a crack addict is dogged by an invulnerable alien; 'The Hardened Criminals', wherein convicts are used as building blocks for new prisons; and 'The Happy Man', whose hapless protagonist is raised from the dead to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell. Each tale features Lethem's characteristic deadpan wit and unflinchingly macabre vision of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.