Jonathan Lethem

In 1970s Brooklyn, with the promise of violence everywhere, a currency itself, this story of community, crime and gentrification chronicles more than 50 years of life in one neighborhood where the players write the headlines, the histories and the laws of the streets.

In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, 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...

A dead man is brought back to life so he can support his family in "The Happy Man", occasionally he slips into a zombielike state while his soul is tortured in Hell. In "Vanilla Dunk," future basketball players are given the skills of old-time stars like Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. And in "Forever, Said the Duck," stored computer personalities scheme to break free of their owners. In these and other stories in this striking collection, Jonathan...

Fred Barney Taylor's Lethem presents a unique portrait of the life and work of Jonathan Lethem, the bestselling author of nine novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, and a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant," through an assemblage of interviews with family members, friends, and the author himself.

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.

Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude) joins Judith Freeman and Rich Cohen in celebrating Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep.

From silly chuckles to rueful ironic glee to deep cosmic laughter, this new volume of humorous tales samples the best of recent seasons of the popular public radio series Selected Shorts.