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On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the
dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted.
The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For
these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in
shadow; some days it may seem that no one knows what happens there.
Yet in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators;
landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws;
those who award this neighbourhood its name. The rules seem obvious
at first. But in memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to
trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as
if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to
crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None
who lived through it are ever permitted to forget. Written with
kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a
breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers.
Jonathan Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers,"
(Washington Post) has crafted an epic interrogation of how we
fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the
world we've made.
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Brooklyn Crime Novel
Jonathan Lethem
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R722
R585
Discovery Miles 5 850
Save R137 (19%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of
Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of
community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years
of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood. "A blistering book. A love
story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins
the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I
got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like
this." -- Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World
Spin On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down:
the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power
asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency
itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is
a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players:
parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the
headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this
neighborhood its name. The rules appear obvious at first. But in
memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The
voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony,
then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and
reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived
through it are ever permitted to forget. Written with kaleidoscopic
verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking
tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan
Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers" (Washington Post),
has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to
contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made.
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the
dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted.
The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For
these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in
shadow; some days it may seem that no one knows what happens there.
Yet in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators;
landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws;
those who award this neighbourhood its name. The rules seem obvious
at first. But in memory's prism, criminals and victims may seem to
trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as
if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to
crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None
who lived through it are ever permitted to forget. Written with
kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a
breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers.
Jonathan Lethem, "one of America's greatest storytellers,"
(Washington Post) has crafted an epic interrogation of how we
fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the
world we've made.
Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, "We Have
Always Lived in the Castle" is a deliciously unsettling novel about
a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the
struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This
edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
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The Arrest (Paperback)
Jonathan Lethem
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R449
R371
Discovery Miles 3 710
Save R78 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A hard-boiled detective tale full of talking animals and murder,
from the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The
Arrest. Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems--there's a rabbit in
his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail.
Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are
members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma
levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are
all the rage. Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an
affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a little in love with her at
the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable
investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys
from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the
back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse. Mixing elements of
sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from a beloved
author is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may
hold.
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.
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.
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.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN IS RELEASED
IN CINEMAS NOVEMBER 2019 Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. the Human Freakshow,
is a victim of Tourette's syndrome (an uncontrollable urge to shout
out nonsense, touch every surface in reach, rearrange objects).
Local tough guy Frank Minna hires the adolescent Lionel and three
other orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys and grooms them to
become the Minna Men, a fly-by-night
detective-agency-cum-limoservice. Then one terrible day Frank is
murdered, and Lionel must become a real detective. With crackling
dialogue, a dazzling evocation of place, and a plot which mimics
Tourette's itself in its freshness and capacity to shock,
Motherless Brooklyn is a bravura performance: funny, tense,
touching, and extravagant.
This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most
original, mesmerizing, and surprising novels: "The Man in the High
Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?," and "Ubik."
From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive 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 small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up
white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's a
neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with
games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black
teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the
knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an
overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and
class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging,
loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude" "is the first great
urban coming of age novel to appear in years.
The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a
utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for
granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters -
stops 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
didn't 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
he's 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 Arrest is speculative fiction at its
absolute finest.
In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny second 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 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.
In 2007, "Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s" became the
fastest selling title in The Library of America's history. The 2008
companion volume, "Five Novels of the1960s & 70s," broke series
records for advance sales. Now comes a third and final volume
gathering the best novels of Dick's final years, when religious
revelation, always important in his work, became a dominant and
irresistible theme.
In "A Maze of Death" (1970), a darkly speculative mystery that
foreshadows Dick's final novels, colonists on the planet Delmak-O
try to determine the nature of the God-or "Mentufacturer"-who plots
their destiny. The late masterpiece "VALIS" (1981) is a novelistic
reworking of "the events of 2-3-74," when Dick's life was
transformed by what he believed was a mystical revelation. It is a
harrowing self-portrait of a man torn between conflicting
interpretations of what might be gnostic illumination or psychotic
breakdown. "The Divine Invasion" (1981), a sequel to "VALIS," is a
powerful exploration of gnostic insight and its human consequences.
"The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" (1982), Dick's last novel,
is by turns theological thriller, roman a clef, and disenchanted
portrait of late 1970s California life, based loosely on the
controversial career of Bishop James Pike-a close friend and
kindred spirit.
It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW
on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the
singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking
Heads have a new album, it's called "Fear of Music""; - and
everything spins outward from that one moment.
Jonathan Lethem treats "Fear of Music"; (the third album by the
Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a
masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic,
repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's
songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics, packaging, downtown origins, and
legacy, showing how "Fear of Music" hints at the directions
(positive and negative) the band would take in the future. Lethem
transports us again to the New York City of another time - tackling
one of his great adolescent obsessions and illuminating the ways in
which we fall in and out of love with works of art.
'A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark
verve and wit' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Underground Railroad Phoebe 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.
Jonathan Lethem, editor "The most outre science fiction writer of
the 20th century has finally entered the canon," exclaimed Wired
Magazine upon The Library of America's May 2007 publication of
Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan
Lethem. Now comes a companion volume collecting five novels that
offer a breathtaking overview of the range of this science-fiction
master. Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was a writer of incandescent
imagination who made and unmade world-systems with ferocious
rapidity and unbridled speculative daring. "The floor joists of the
universe," he once wrote, "are visible in my novels." Martian
Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red
Planet where schizophrenia is a contagion and the unscrupulous seek
to profit from a troubled child's time-fracturing visions. Dr.
Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles
the deeply-interwoven stories of a multi-racial community of
survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible
for World War III. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy
session involving a talking taxicab, Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only
perception, but reality. In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
(1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left
him stripped of his identity. A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis
for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a
narcotics officer's tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new
surveillance assignment: himself. Mixing metaphysics and madness,
phantasmagoric visions of a post-nuclear world and invading
extraterrestrial authoritarians, and all-too-real evocations of the
drugged-out America of the 70s, Dick's work remains exhilarating
and unsettling in equal measure. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an
independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to
preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping
permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing.
The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to
date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length,
feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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