Jonathan Lethem

A black comedy in New York's criminal underworld. The twitching hero--he suffers from Tourette's syndrome--is one of four misfits who were rescued from an orphanage by a man who gave them jobs in his detective agency. Now the man has been killed and the boys intend to get the killer.

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....

In the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes by 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 parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear...

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star. Capitalizing on the rapturous and heartbreaking love letters he receives from his teenage sweetheart and fiancee, he lives a life of cloistered ease--that is until a pop critic with a conspiratorial countercultural savvy and a voracious paranoia force him to confront the answers to several mysteries tightly intertwined within...

"Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories uncovers a father's nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in "Pending Vegan"; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in "Traveler Home"; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in "Procedure in Plain Air"; and a crumbling, haunted "blog" on a seaside cliff in "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear." Each of these locates itself in Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting....

"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:...

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.

This collection compiles his intensely personal thoughts on the most interesting and deplorable topics in

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