Search results for ""Author Jonathan Lethem""
Vintage Publishing Lucky Alan
A father’s 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.
£9.04
Atlantic Books Brooklyn Crime Novel
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 kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guy's 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 we've made
£18.00
Continuum Publishing Corporation Talking Heads' Fear of Music
Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, was recorded and released in 1979. It is, like each of their first four albums, a masterpiece. Edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky, and fun - with Brian Eno's production, it's a record that bursts out of the downtown scene that birthed the band, and hints at the directions (positive and negative) they'd take in the near future. Here, Jonathan Lethem takes us back to the late 1970s in New York City and situates Talking Heads as one of the most remarkable and enigmatic American bands. Incorporating theory, fiction, and memoir, and placing Fear of Music alongside Fritz Lang, Edgar Allen Poe, Patti Smith, and David Foster Wallace. Lethem's book is a virtuoso performance by a writer at the peak of his powers, tackling one of his great obsessions.
£9.99
Atlantic Books Brooklyn Crime Novel
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 kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guy's 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 we've made
£14.99
Everyman Motherless Brooklyn Fortress of Solitude
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
£20.00
Faber & Faber Gun, with Occasional Music
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.
£9.99
Atlantic Books The Feral Detective
'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 vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble - caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous...Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.
£8.99
Faber & Faber The Fortress of Solitude
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.
£10.99
Vintage Publishing The Blot
**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.
£9.04
ZE Books Intelligence for Dummies: Essays and Other Collected Writings
"Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader's life." --Michael Chabon A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O'Brien's own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. Glenn O'Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O'Brien's essays, aphorisms and tweets, to create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal apercu into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat's New York, and the culture of money that ensued. It also reveals O'Brien's incisive and prescient understanding of America's political culture, and of our current president.
£22.50
Orion Publishing Co The Exegesis of Philip K Dick
Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74", a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information". In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.
£22.50