New Releases by Jonathan Lethem

“One of the cleverest, most accessibly in-depth film books released this year . . . a smart-ass novelist exploring a cheesy-cheeky ‘80s sci-fi flick.”—Hartford Advocate Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult classics, and more . . . Kicking off the series is Jonathan Lethem’s take on They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 classic amalgam of deliberate B-movie, sci-fi, horror, anti-Yuppie agitprop. Lethem exfoliates Carpenter’s paranoid satire in a series of penetrating, free-associational forays into the context of a story that peels the human masks off the ghoulish overlords of capitalism. Taking into consideration classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction—as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory—They Live provides a wholly original perspective on Carpenter’s subversive classic.

COUSIN CORINNE''S REMINDER is a biannual publication which features new writing, photography, and comix from artists around the world.

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it''s like to be young in Los Angeles. Lucinda Hoekke''s daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line—an art gallery''s high-minded installation piece—is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda''s band begins to incorporate the Complainer''s catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in.

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.

Dylan a cinq ans lorsque ses parents s''installent à Brooklyn. Ce sont les seuls Blancs du quartier. Son père, Abraham, un peintre conceptuel, passe ses journées dans son atelier. Sa mère est une gauchiste persuadée qu''il n''y a rien de tel que grandir dans la rue. Dylan apprend peu à peu les règles du quartier. Mais ce petit garçon blond et timide reste isolé parmi les gamins noirs et portoricains. Jusqu''à ce que Mingus s''installe près de chez lui. Elevé par son père, une pop-star oubliée accro à la cocaïne, Mingus est métis. Il prend Dylan sous son aile, le protège, l''initie aux comics, au graffiti, et plus tard au hip-hop, à la soul et la drogue. L''un est blanc, l''autre noir. Tous deux sont seuls dans cette ville dangereuse comme une forêt de conte de fées. Forteresse de solitude est un livre sur l''enfance, le souvenir et la rédemption. C''est aussi une fresque de l''Amérique de la rue, depuis les années 70 où le choix de chaque vêtement, chaque disque, chaque mot est un acte politique dans la guerre larvée pour la conquête du quartier, jusqu''aux années 2000 où plus rien ne compte. Porté par sa vision poétique, Jonathan Lethem passe constamment du réel à l''imaginaire, dans ce livre extraordinaire qui doit autant à Charles Dickens qu''à William Blake.

A boozy ex-military captain trapped in a mysterious vessel searches for his runaway son, an aging superhero settles into academia, and a professional "dystopianist" receives a visit from a suicidal sheep. Men and Cartoons contains eleven fantastical, amusing, and moving stories written in a dizzying array of styles that shows the remarkable range and power of Lethem''s vision. Sometimes firmly grounded in reality, and other times spinning off into utterly original imaginary worlds, this book brings together marvelous characters with incisive social commentary and thought provoking allegories. A visionary and creative collection that only Jonathan Lethem could have produced, the Vintage edition features two stories not published in the hardcover edition, "The Shape We''re In" and "Interview with the Crab.

*Weitere Angaben Verfasser: Jonathan Lethem, geboren 1964, lebt in Brooklyn, New York und in Maine. Sein Bestseller Die Festung der Einsamkeit wurde von der New York Times zum besten Buch des Jahres gekürt. Im Tropen Verlag sind drei weitere Romane erschienen. Für Motherless Brooklyn erhielt er den National Book Critics Circle Award.

A New York Times Book Review EDITORS'' CHOICE. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys'' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time

Unorthodox materials such as over-the-counter remedies, medicinal herbs, prescription pills and psychoactive plants are just some of the materials that make up artist Fred Tomaselli''s collaged paintings. Others include cut-out photographs of flowers, insects and leaves from field guides and seed catalogues that jostle for attention with their carefully-pressed and preserved real-life counterparts. Whole figures crafted from magazine cut-outs of animals and body parts--nightmarish Archimboldo-esque hybrids--present Tomaselli''s intensely personal vision of the universe. Moving between abstractions and figurations, Monsters of Paradise presents 32 visually exuberant works reproduced in glorious color, and provides a comprehensive view of Tomaselli''s work from 1995 to today.

Lionel Essrog a grandi avec ses copains à l''orphelinat de Brooklyn. Devenu adulte, il est embauché par un " privé ", Franck Minna, dont l''agence se livre à de louches activités sous prétexte de déménagements. Les Orphelins de Brooklyn raconte l''histoire des " Minna Boys ", leurs arnaques et leurs combines, le meurtre de leur patron et l''enquête rocambolesque qui s''ensuit. Mais le véritable intérêt de ce livre est ailleurs : en effet, Essrog est affligé d''une maladie rare, le syndrome de Gilles de la Tourette, série de troubles obsessionnels compulsifs (TOC) qui font de sa vie un enfer, et dont le principal symptôme consiste en des éruptions verbales incontrôlées. Prétexte, pour Jonathan Lethem, à d''étincelantes variations langagières sur le thème du roman noir " hard boiled ", revu et corrigé par un disciple de Tex Avery.

Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, "Kafka Americana" has achieved cult status. In an act of literary appropriation, the authors seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of 20th century America.

Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem''s imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming, is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in a projection booth therem trying to blot out his present, unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant, Kellog, reveals to him over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth is a little more complicated. . . .

Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.