Search results for ""Author J Robert Lennon""

Let Me Think is a meticulous selection of short stories by one of the preeminent chroniclers of the American absurd. Through J. Robert Lennon's mordant yet sympathetic eye, the quotidian realities of marriage, family, and work are rendered powerfully strange in this rich and innovative collection. These stories, most no more than a few pages, are at once experimental and compulsively readable, the work of an expert craftsman who can sketch whole lives in a mere handful of lines, or reveal, over pages, the boundless complexity of a passing thought. Here you'll find a heist gone wrong, a case of mistaken identity, a hostile encounter with a neighborhood eccentric, a glass eye, a talking owl, and a six-fingered hand. Whatever the subject, Lennon disarms the reader with humor before pivoting to pathos, pain, and disappointment-most notably in an extraordinary sequence of darting, painfully funny fictions about a disintegrating marriage that captures the myriad ways intimacy can fail us, and the ways that we can fail it. Like Lennon's earlier story collection Pieces for the Left Hand, Let Me Think holds a mirror up to our long-held grudges and secret desires, our petty resentments and moments of redeeming grace, and confirms him as a virtuoso of the form.

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An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse's owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels. A lovelorn truck driver . . . a mysterious child . . . a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called "a master of the dark arts." With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of perception and memory.

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'A loot drop of brilliance' Naomi Alderman, author of The Power 'Critical Hits is an exciting, original and rich collection. It made me want to read more, to write more, and - I admit without shame - to play more' New Statesman Whether you're an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way you interact with the world, and have been part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits is a celebration of play and playfulness, and the lasting impact of videogames. Composed of sharp, impassioned, and inquisitive essays, this collection begins with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado and presents video games through the eyes of eighteen writer-gamers as they straddle real and artificial worlds. In games, they find solace from illness and grief, test ideas about language, bodies, race, and technology, and see their experiences and identities reflected in-or complicated by-the interactive virtual realities they inhabit. From a deep dive into "portal fantasy" games by Charlie Jane Anders and a comic by MariNaomi about her time as a video game producer, to the overlaps in gaming and poetry by Stephen Sexton, Critical Hits illuminates fragments of an industry that is wildly popular, grossly misunderstood, and absolutely spellbinding.

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