Showing results by author "Jonathan Lethem" in All Categories

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count and rip apart 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, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside down.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

In this breathtakingly imaginative book - now appearing in audio for the first time - we enter the mind of an unnamed artist of prodigious talent and intelligence who is determined to correct the world's wrongs via a direct confrontation with the Almighty, no matter what the consequences. A spellbinding tale told by a memorably unreliable narrator, It Happened in Boston? places you inside a vivid world that brilliantly and surprisingly interweaves art, genius, love, madness, betrayal, God... and murder.

Chandler's dark first novel is full of endlessly inventive wordplay, with the wry, cynical, private detective Philip Marlowe. Join the investigation with Jonathan Lethem ( Gun, With Occasional Music and Fortress of Solitude), Judith Freeman ( The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved), and Rich Cohen ( Sweet and Low: A Family Story) as they compare notes on Chandler's grand style, its place in the mystery canon, and its influence on their work.