Jonathan Lethem

Convincing an enigmatic loner to help her search for a friend's missing daughter, Phoebe traverses the outskirts of California's stunning Inland Empire, where she discovers her companion's complicated relationship with warring tribes of outcasts.

Seven futuristic stories. In The Happy Man, a dead man is periodically let out of Hell so he can support his family, while in The Hardened Criminals the walls of a jail are made of convicts in suspended animation. By the author of Gun, with Occasional Music.

"Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a recording session with Otis Redding; Ellen Willis traces the meteoric career of Janis Joplin; Ellen Sander recalls the chaotic world of Led Zeppelin on tour; Nick Tosches etches a portrait of the young Jerry Lee Lewis; Eve Babitz remembers Jim Morrison. Alongside are Lenny Kaye on acapella and Greg Tate on hip-hop, Vince Aletti on disco and Gerald Early on Motown; Robert Christgau on Prince, Nelson George on Marvin Gaye, Luc Sante on Bob Dylan, Hilton Als on Michael Jackson, Anthony DeCurtis on the Rolling Stones, Kelefa Sanneh on Jay Z. The story this anthology tells is a ongoing one: "it's too early," editors Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar note, "for canon formation in a field so marvelously volatile--a volatility that mirrors, still, that of pop music itself, which remains smokestack lightning. The writing here attempts to catch some in a bottle."--Provided by publisher.

"A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers--an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose's suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference. As the decades pass--from the parlor communism of the '30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged '70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment--we come to understand through Lethem's extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal. Brilliantly constructed as it weaves across time and among characters, Dissident Gardens is riotous and haunting, satiric and sympathetic--and a joy to read"--

"'A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius.'--Jonathan Lethem. Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work."-- "Preserved in typed and hand-written notes and journal entries, letters and story sketches, Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick will make this tantalizing work available to the public for the first time in an annotated two-volume abridgement. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work"--

"A collection of bestselling, NBCC prize-winning author Jonathan Lethem's finest writing on the subject of writers and writing. A readerly wake-up call from one of America's finest and most acclaimed working writers. Picking up where his NBCC Award finalist collection The Ecstasy of Influence left off, More Alive and Less Lonely collects more than a decade of Lethem's finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appeals for forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries. Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight about the stories of modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick, and classic icons like Moby-Dick. Edited by novelist Christopher Boucher (Golden Delicious), More Alive and Less Lonely deserves a place on every serious reader's bookshelf. Lethem's joyful approach to literature will inspire you to dive back into your favorite books and then point you towards what to read next"--

Roman de société

Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new readers--nine fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles, as Lethem samples high and low culture to create fictional worlds that are utterly original. Longtime readers will recognize echoes of Lethem's novels in all these pieces--narrators who can't stop babbling, hapless would-be detectives, people with unusual powers that do them no good, hot-blooded academics, and characters whose clever repartee masks lovelorn desperation as they negotiate both the stumbling path of romance and the bittersweet obligations of friendship.Among them:"The Vision" is a story about drunken neighborhood parlor games, boys who dress up as superheroes, and the perils of snide curiosity."Access Fantasy" is part social satire, part weird detective story. Evoking Lethem's earliest work, it conjures up a world divided between people who have apartments and people trapped in an endless traffic jam behind The One-Way Permeable Barrier."The Spray" is a simple story about how people in love deal with their past. A magical spray is involved. "Vivian Relf" is a tour de force about loss. A man meets a woman at a party; they're sure they've met before, but they haven't. As the years progress this strangely haunting encounter comes to define the narrator's life."The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door" is a Borgesian tale that features suicidal sheep. (This story won a Pushcart Prize when first published in Conjunctions.)"Super Goat Man" is a savagely funny expose of the failures of the sixties baby boomers, and of their children.Sparkling with the off-beat humor and subtle insights, Men and Cartoons is a welcome addition to the shelf of the writer "whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among his country's foremost novelists." --Salon

"For the last fifty years, artists have explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between the government and its citizens that haunts Western democracies. Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy will be the first major exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic. It will trace the simultaneous development of two kinds of art about conspiracy. The first half of the exhibition will comprise works by artists who hew strictly to the public record, uncovering hidden webs of deceit--from the shell corporations used by New York's largest private landlord, interconnected networks encompassing politicians, businessmen, and arms dealers. In the second part, other artists will dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that nevertheless uncover uncomfortable truths in an age of information overload and weakened trust in institutions. Featuring seventy works by thirty artists in media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, from 1969 to 2016, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy will present an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times."-- "Since the mid-twentieth century, conspiracy has pervaded our collective worldview, shaped by events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and 9/11. Everything Is Connected examines how artists from the 1960s to the present have explored both the covert operations of power and the mutual suspicion between governments and their citizens. Featured are works by some thirty artists--including Sarah Charlesworth, Emory Douglas, Hans Haacke, Rachel Harrison, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Mark Lombardi, Cady Noland, Trevor Paglen, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and Sue Williams--in media ranging from painting, drawing, and photography to video and installation art. Whether they uncover webs of deceit hidden in the public record or dive headlong into paranoid fever dreams, these artists use their work to take a powerful and proactive stance against the political corruption, consumerism, bureaucracy, and media manipulation that are hallmarks of contemporary life."--