Lucky Alan

New stories from ‘an American master’. (Daily Telegraph)

Sharp, sad, sophisticated, funny and sometimes exceedingly strange

Lucky Alan is worth reading for those stories that convey so adroitly people’s beleaguered attempts to communicate with one another.

The confidence of Lethem’s narration and the clarity of his language save any of this from whimsy: that’s a tough trick to pull off, but Lethem does it over and over again. No wonder he won a MacArthur fellowship (the famous “genius grant”) a decade ago.

A powerful glimpse into where Lethem is as a writer right now.

These strange, largely wonderful short stories are yet another welcome dispatch from the freewheeling imagination of one of America’s most admired prose writers.

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times-bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has also published his stories and essays in the New Yorker, Harper‘s, Rolling Stone, Esquire and the New York Times, among others.

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.

Dissident Gardens

A dazzling novel from one of America's finest writers – the story of three generations of a radical New York family 
 
Longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize

The cast makes for a heady, swirly mix of fascinating, lonely people. Lethem’s writing, as always, packs a witty punch. The epoch each character inhabits is artfully etched and the book is as illuminating of 20th-century American history as it is of the human burden of overcoming alienation.

Lethem is breathtaking in this torrent of potent voices, searing ironies, popculture allusions, and tragicomic complexities. He shreds the folk scene, eviscerates quiz shows...and offers unusual perspectives on societal debacles and tragic injustices. A righteous, stupendously involving novel about the personal toll of failed political movements and the perplexing obstacles to doing good.

Lethem has written a brilliant, funny, compendious novel at whose heart lies a sharp, slim blade of thought and style.

Superb… Dissident Gardens can be placed squarely in the canon of the great American social novel.

This epic family novel criss-crosses generations from the Fifties to the present day.

An urgent and necessary message at a time when Wall Street is once again poised with its heel on the face of the 99%.

Dissident Gardens seamlessly weaves together three generations, yet it doesn't broadcast itself as a multi-generational epic, nor is it afflicted by the desire to pose as the next great American novel. It’s an intimate book.

Jonathan Lethem’s ninth novel and finest work so far.

With this novel Jonathan Lethem has inhabited the vacated position among the first rank of American realists.

Written with argumentative brio and immense stylistic fireworks.

A book with a soul at least as big as its ideas.

Lethem is a tremendously gifted novelist.

Jonathan Lethem’s beautifully pitched ninth novel weaves a story of radicalism and domestic drama across three generations

Longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize 
 
Longlisted for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 
 
In 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last. In fact, Rose – like all American Communists – got screwed by the entire twentieth century. She doesn’t take it lying down. For over forty years she pounds the streets of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, terrorising the neighbourhood, and her family, with the implacability of her beliefs, the sheer force of her grudge. 
 
And the generations that follow Rose will not easily escape her influence, her ire, her radicalism. Foremost among these is Miriam, Rose's charismatic and passionate want-away hippie daughter, who heads for the Greenwich Village of the Sixties; her black stepson Cicero, an angry debunking machine; and her bewildered grandson Sergius, who finds himself an orphan in the capitalist now. 
 
A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American twentieth century, Dissident Gardens is the story of a group of individuals who fought and lost, but might one day win. It is a blast of pure style and literary dazzle from one of the great and most innovative writers of the age.

Nonfictions, etc.

The Ecstasy of Influence

A career-spanning collection of writings - essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction and commentary - from one of the greats of contemporary American literature.

A high-wire juggling act where all the balls are kept spinning perfectly

The pleasure for readers is twofold: on one hand, there is the intrinsic interest in the subjects...On the other, there’s the fact that this is Lethem telling us these things, and how it gives an insight into his own creative practice

Thoughtful and rambunctious ... a jazzy, patchwork memoir ... [a] fresh, erudite, zestful, funny frolic in the great fields of creativity

Hefty and remarkable... These byways, all of which make room for eccentric flights as well as proper essays, augment the charm and impact of what Lethem prefers to call an autobiographical collage

He’s a novelist who has spent a lifetime creating his own subversive pantheon, a jumpy CBGB’s of the literary soul… Several of the essays here marinate in the fish sauce that is literary gossip… feisty, freewheeling, funny

The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited… Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it

Lethem writes with a commitment to sharing his enthusiasm for whatever obsesses him ... While the results illuminate his formative influences and artistic development, they also cast considerable light on the culture at large, which is both reflected in Lethem's work and has profoundly shaped it

Jonathan Lethem...writes superb essays... lovely subtlety

Jonathan Lethem, the New York novelist, writes superb essays

Superb collection of essays… Clever but satisfying, too

Impassioned and detailed studies offset with bagatelles

This volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring and Marlon Brando. Then there are investigations of a shelf's worth of Jonathan Letham's literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, one of the greats of contemporary American literature sheds an equally strong light on himself. 
 
In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the 'white elephant' role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers. 
 
Funny and unfettered, The Ecstasy of Influence simmers with direct challenges to conventional wisdom and deep insights into the kaleidoscopic nature of artistic vision, the primacy of the writer in the cultural marketplace, and the way the author's own experiences have fuelled his creative passions.

Jonathan Lethem

A return to form, absurd and digressive in a way that makes clear Lethem’s debt to Thomas Pynchon

Lethem can turn a sentence like few others

Lethem is a renowned stylist who turns out funny, exuberant, surprising sentences, and who has a deep love of genre fiction

Lethem’s phrasemaking is as vivid and funny as ever

The Blot does not disappoint. It sets a high bar for 2017’s fiction… There are moments of genuine, inexplicable tenderness as well as the sarcasm, venality and schadenfreude that swirl around the book… It also shows… that the genre best equipped to speak truthfully about the world we are in is not a flat-footed and sententious realism, but un-realism.

The encounter Lethem depicts in the German’s ostentatiously costly study […] is one of the finest standalone scenes I’ve read in some time… there is much to admire here: the author’s ability to bend genre; the depth of his knowledge of his chosen subjects (backgammon; brain surgery) and the breadth of his pop culture references… Few writers can compete with Lethem for fluency and panache.

There are probably a dozen novelists whose new books, every one, I’m predisposed to read. Jonathan Lethem is one of them. I like his fundamental literary ratios — plot-to-pensées, comedy-to-tragedy — and the prose is a pleasure, lucid sentences that swerve and surprise without being show-offy

Jonathan Lethem’s new novel combines a little of the intrigue of James Bond with all the sexiness of backgammon. The result is a literary game that’s shaken not stirred.

This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a “Twilight Zone” episode filmed by the Coen brothers … Lethem has intense gifts; nothing he writes is a waste of time.

Lethem's 10th novel is a romp in which history, both personal and collective, can't help but assert itself... Think Thomas Pynchon, especially in the scenes set in Berkeley, a landscape of hipster burger shops and lost souls still longing for a revolution that washed out in an undertow of drugs and dissolution decades before. [A] fitting follow-up to Dissident Gardens (2013)... Lethem takes real pleasure in the language and writes with a sense of the absurd that illuminates his situations and his characters... In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.

A humorously surreal and articulate story of Bruno's search for himself after having his face and brain rearranged, both by surgery and by modern life in general, this is, among other things, a great Berkeley novel like Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue.

**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.

Jonathan Lethem

Praise for The Blot

A return to form, absurd and digressive in a way that makes clear Lethem’s debt to Thomas Pynchon

Lethem can turn a sentence like few others

Lethem is a renowned stylist who turns out funny, exuberant, surprising sentences, and who has a deep love of genre fiction

A return to form, absurd and digressive in a way that makes clear Lethem’s debt to Thomas Pynchon

Lethem can turn a sentence like few others

Lethem is a renowned stylist who turns out funny, exuberant, surprising sentences, and who has a deep love of genre fiction

A return to form, absurd and digressive in a way that makes clear Lethem’s debt to Thomas Pynchon

Lethem can turn a sentence like few others

Lethem is a renowned stylist who turns out funny, exuberant, surprising sentences, and who has a deep love of genre fiction

Books by Jonathan Lethem

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