Jonathan Lethem

Don Carpenter was one of the finest novelists working in the west. His first novel, A Hard Rain Falling, first published in 1966, has been championed by Richard Price, and George Pelacanos who called it  a masterpiece the definitive juvenile-delinquency novel and a damning indictment of our criminal justice system," is considered a classic. His novel A Couple of Comedians is thought by some the best novel about Hollywood ever written. He was a close friend of Evan Connell and other San Francisco writers, but his closest friendship was with Richard Brautigan, and when Brautigan killed himself, Carpenter tried for some time to write a biography of his remarkable, deeply troubled friend. He finally abandoned that in favor of writing a novel. Friday's at Enricos, the story of four writers living in Northern California and Portland during the early, heady days of the Beat scene. A time of youth and opportunity, this story mixes the excitement of beginning with the melancholy of ambition, often thwarted and never satisfied. Loss of innocence is only the first price you pay. These are people, men and women, tender with expectation, at risk and in love, and Carpenter also carefully draws a portrait of these two remarkable places, San Francisco and Portland, in the 50s and early 60s, when the writers and bohemians were busy creating the groundwork for what came to be the counterculture. A great champion of Don Carpenter, Jonathan Lethem, has taken on the task of editing and developing this last draft into the shape we imagine Carpenter would have himself accomplished had he lived to see this through. And Lethem provides a wonderful introduction to this book, to Carpenter, and to the broad influence of his work which resonates until this very day.

Longlisted for the 2015 Folio PrizeLonglisted for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardIn 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed.

A New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, The Globe and Mail Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called "as ambitious as Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan" (Los Angeles Times), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her equally passionate and willful daughter, Miriam, flees Rose's influence for the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. Despite their differences, they share a power to enchant the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her feckless chess hustler cousin, Lenny; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinger husband, Tommy Gogan; and their bewildered son, Sergius. Through Lethem's vivid storytelling we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

An uninvited guest, entering the empty New York apartment of a man known to intimates as Dom, proceeds to write for his absent host a curious confession. Its close accounts of friendship since boyhood with two men surely unknown to Dom and certainly to each other is interleaved with the story of Dom himself. Ancient History is one of the only novels by Joseph McElroy to not have been re-issued in paperback, coming out alongside his new novel after a year-long re-introduction of his work to readers via eBooks.

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.

National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookA Best Book of the Year --Austin American-StatesmanIncludes a new, previously uncollected piece: "My Internet" In The Ecstasy of Influence, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces--essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism--which also doubles as a novelist's manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture.

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.

Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive former child-star, living a vague routine of dinner parties and glamorous engagements on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Meanwhile, his astronaut fiancee, trapped on the International Space Station, sends him rapturous love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift. And into Chase's life enters Perkus Tooth.

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. A searing and wildly entertaining love letter to New York City from the bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude. Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life--permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fianc e, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan. Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price. "Full of dark humor and dazzling writing" --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

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it's like to be young in Los Angeles. Lucinda Hoekke's daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line--an art gallery's high-minded installation piece--is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda's band begins to incorporate the Complainer's catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in.

A striking short story collection from "one of the most unique and imaginative writers of his generation" (USA Today)Welcome to the many and fascinating worlds of Jonathan Lethem's striking story collection: A dead man extends his stay on Earth in order to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell; basketball players wear suits that lend them the skills of old-time stars like Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain; a couple invites the avatars of all their old lovers to their engagement party as a last hurrah; and every time a man takes a lover, her world begins to unwind, until she loses her place in it completely. In these and other stories in this collection, Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest and The Fortress of Solitude, draws the reader ever more deeply into his strange, unforgettable world--a trip from which there may be no easy return.

Blending elements of reminiscence and cultural commentary, the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn presents a series of imaginative essays that address a wide range of cultural obsessions, in such works as "Defending The Searchers," "Identifying with Your Parents," and "13/1977/21," about the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

A funny, inventive, and wholly original post-apocalyptic novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn and The ArrestMeet Chaos, a young man who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans. It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.

Written between 1957 and 1960, these short stories by the sci-fi master establish the author as a fine craftsman of short fiction in the genre, taking readers from the space race of the 1950s on Earth to Mars and beyond, in such works as "The Man Who Told Lies," "A Touch of Strange," "It Opens the Sky," "The Graveyard Reader," and the title story.

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.

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.

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.

Some of today's leading young authors contribute a vast array of short stories all inspired by popular songs, in an anthology featuring selections by Julianna Baggot, David Ebershoff, Amanda Davis, Neal Pollack, Tom Perrotta, Rebecca Wells, Nelson George, Greil Marcus, Ernesto Quinonez, J. T. Leroy, and others. Original.