Lethem, Jonathan

Average customer rating:

It is a different type of book,--you should read it anyway
This one's a sheep in wolf's clothing
Wordplay
You don't love me yet
Slacker nostalgia

You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel
Jonathan Lethem
Manufacturer: Doubleday
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 038551218X
Release Date: 2007-03-13

Amazon.com

With his sixth novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem continues to show off his dexterity with the form, following up the coming-of-age epic The Fortress of Solitude with a dreamlike, comic portrait of the Los Angeles art scene. Lethem craftily sets up his ruse with a letter of complaint from Falmouth Strand (a seemingly minor character) who warns us that the book we are about to read completely misrepresents the truth. Falmouth is a former installation artist who has turned from sculpting objects to "manipulating people's despair, pensiveness, ennui." For his latest project, he has posted signs around Los Angeles: "Complaints? Call 213 291 7778." The novel centers around Lucinda (the perfect, unwitting instrument for Falmouth's manipulation), a bass player in a would-be indie rock quartet with nearly enough good songs for a 35-minute set (if you don't count the two they don't like anymore). Lucinda has vowed to stop sleeping with the band's lead singer Matthew (for real, this time), launching a search for true love as drunken and misguided as the band's search for a decent name. She abandons her upscale barista gig to answer complaint calls for Falmouth's conceptual art piece. Before long, she finds herself drawn to a regular whose curious words are "like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass" of daily complaints. By way of Lucinda, the "genius" complainer's words spark the band's next song, setting them on a shaky upward trajectory all too familiar in the art world. Various characters want (or don't want) to take credit for the song's apparent success, but who deserves it? The complainer who nonchalantly rattled off the words, Lucinda who wrote them down, the remaining band members who collaboratively put them to music, or Falmouth himself, who passively engineered the whole thing?

Fans of Fortress and Motherless Brooklyn may find this novel's levity too drastic a shift, but even though Lethem is having a great time here with wordplay, a motley cast, and Lucinda's sexual meanderings, You Don't Love Me Yet is anything but a simple entertainment. He plays with our notions of art and authorship, enjoying a bit of advanced cribbery himself as he experiments with Shakespearean antics and inexplicable love match-ups. At every turn, Lethem seems to be asking sticky questions: Can anyone create the consummate intersection of dream, desire, and reality that art (and great sex) embodies? Will it last, and should it? Can any one writer capture that moment with a few meager words? If they did, how long would it take for it to be reduced to meaningless slogan? --Heidi Broadhead

Book Description

From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art

Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminat Harangues, tome 2 : Sur la paix - IIe Philippique - Sur l'Halonnèse - Sur les affaires de Chersonèse - IIIe et IVe Philippique - Lettre de Philippe - ... ppe - Sur le traité avec Alexandre, 7e tirage

Harangues, tome 2 : Sur la paix - IIe Philippique - Sur l'Halonnèse - Sur les affaires de Chersonèse - IIIe et IVe Philippique - Lettre de Philippe - ... ppe - Sur le traité avec Alexandre, 7e tirage

Harangues, tome 2 : Sur la paix - IIe Philippique - Sur l'Halonnèse - Sur les affaires de Chersonèse - IIIe et IVe Philippique - Lettre de Philippe - ... ppe - Sur le traité avec Alexandre, 7e tirage
Authors: Démosthène, M. Croiset
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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ringtone88.com "0">
Average customer rating:

Kinda disappointing...
Lyrical, Thoughtful, One-of-a-Kind
Excellent and Contemporary
Sheer pleasure
Motherless Brooklyn, Fatherless World

Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Fortress of Solitude
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You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel
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ASIN: 0375724834
Release Date: 2000-10-24

Amazon.com

Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.

This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital.

Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot

Book Description

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our 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 Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Customer Reviews:

Kinda disappointing..........2007-06-09

I really like Jonathan Lethem as an author. His books are usually quite interesting, clever, and humorous. Motherless Brooklyn disappointed me. The humor was not there, I seriously think Lethem tried to be funny but it simply failed. The characters were especially bland, and it was hard to become "attached" to Lionel the main character/narrarator. He spent too much time informing us that Lionel has Tourette's Syndrome, not enough time developing the story. The Tourette's was seriously (as someone previously stated in their review) the crutch that this book propped itself up on. Had it spent more time on the story, the book would have earned at least 4 stars because the story was interesting when time was spent explaining it. Gun, With Occassional Music is a much better detective story in my opinion. After a while, while I enjoyed parts of the book, I found myself reading it so that I could finish it. For serious Lethem fans only.

Lyrical, Thoughtful, One-of-a-Kind.......2007-06-07

Nothing about this book should be compared, I believe, to any standard genre fiction. The only standard is clear, compelling writing with believable characters and honest events. So rich is Lionel's world, and he is such a keen observer, that the experience is lifted to a feeling of depth like few other pieces of modern-day writing. The plot is really about self-discovery, about stepping outside your comfort zone, and about finding a home. So many wonderful, touching scenes side-by-side with compelling tension and a terrific, underlying drive to the plot.

Excellent and Contemporary.......2007-05-27

Lethem is in a rare class of contemporary writers. His work enfolds you into a time period in Brooklyn, NY exploring all that makes the boro unique. This work is fascinating for the NY reader and the non NY reader alike. His characters are well crafted and his plot line solid. The book does explore themes of mafia and deceit which are always entertaining.

Sheer pleasure.......2007-03-01

I had a wonderful time reading this book. I laughed out loud. I savored everything Essrog had to say. I can see how some might lack the flavors necessary to appreciate this book, but for those of us with that special wiring, this book is a classic. Enjoy.

Motherless Brooklyn, Fatherless World.......2007-01-19

Watching a man having her words slit by his mirror image is an odd way to create a story world. Not least because of the characters intellectual borders are clearly a redundant side issue. Letham's story world is bigger than his players 'standart day breaks-in, their perspective into the easy imagination and academic language that guiding the readers behind the main characters mind; easily Essrog's back ground much more loaded by the "f" words- in "Clockwork Orange" Burgess was avoided easy cultural referances and cr L'encyclopédie de l'emploi

L'encyclopédie de l'emploi

L'encyclopédie de l'emploi
Authors: Maya Nuq
Catalog: Book
Media: Relié
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: De Vecchi
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ringtone88.com ep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.

Customer Reviews:

The Definitive PKD.......2007-06-08

In the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.

a great collection.......2007-05-18

This ought to be one of three volumes of Dick's novels; in that case it would probably be the best. A full set of six including the short stories would be invaluable. I would also like to see the Library of America produce a Robert E. Howard volume.

PKD Would Be Proud.......2007-05-16

This handsome volume of four of PKD's most acclaimed science-fiction novels from the '60s is a pure delight. To be included in the company of John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow (two other authors graced with 2007 Library of America releases) doubtlessly would make PKD smile: finally vindicated! I'm not sure that his days of horsemeat-eating and penny-ante royalty checks are truly assuaged by this posthumous honor--but better late than never. The chronology of Dick's life and works at the volume's close is detailed and heartwrenching. Hopefully Dick's inclusion in the Library of America series will further increase his worldwide status as a major American talent who transcended the limitations of his genre, creating dystopian visions of lasting significance for humanity.

I hope we soon will be feted with a companion volume of four of Dick's mainstream novels--perhaps [...]
Wherever you are, PKD--hat's off! It's not just kibble anymore.

Unfortunate Choice.......2007-05-14

The Library of America (LOA) has decided to broaden the canon of American literature by issuing a good deal of writing that is not traditionally considered literature. This includes important political documents, high quality journalism, and historical works like the great works of Parkman and Adams. This is really admirable. LOA has decided also to publish the better work from some distinctively American popular genres. This has led to publication, for example, of Raymond Chandler's novels. This is also admirable.
LOA has apparently decided to publish some Science Fiction and has led with some of the novels of Philip Dick. This is a mistake. Dick has aroused some enthusiasm in academic circles because a good deal of his work has a modernist/experimental character. As stated in a blurb on a recent paperback edition of one of his novels, he is a poor man's Thomas Pynchon. Dick, however, was a markedly uneven writer. Some of his work is decent but much is not written particularly well. Genre fiction is often judged by extra-literary criteria. In the case of the best Science Fiction, this is usually a sort of gee-whiz intellectual novelty. Dick is hardly outstanding by this criterion. His work tends to fall between two stools, as a modernist/experimental writer, he is hardly first rate. If you want Thomas Pynchon, you should read Thomas Pynchon. Neither does he represent the intellectual novelty of better Science Fiction.
If LOA really wants to bring out good collections of Science Fiction, they should consider the following. A good short story anthology, which might include a couple of Dick's stories, would be excellent as there is a substantial body of good Science Fiction short stories. A selection of the small number of good novels, including books like Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would be good. If they want to do single author volumes, then Ursula LeGuin and Cordwainer Smith would be the only reasonable candidates.

Average customer rating:

Slow reading, but probably worthwhile
A Gorgeous Book
Hopeless
Four stars for the first half
A Pretty Good Book, A Great Writer

The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0571219357

Book Description

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."

This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.

This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.

This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.

This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.

This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.

From the Hardcover edition.

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¿Lethem has done a number of things here, any one of which is impossible for any but the very finest novelists. He has vividly and lovingly and truthfully, through thrilling evocation of its music, its popular culture, its street games, argot, pharmacology, social mores and racial politics, recreated a world, a moment in history that I would have thought lost and irrecoverable. He has created, in young Dylan, a genuine literary hero. He has reinvented and reinvigorated the myths of the superhero, of black-white relations, of New York City itself. But most of all, from my point of view, he captures precisely¿as only a great novelist can¿how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass.¿
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys

¿THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is luminous, stinging with truth and life. A story of two boys, a Brooklyn story, an American story that gives in its very specificity the force of the universal.¿
--Paula Fox, author of Desperate Charact L'Enlèvement d'Hélène

L'Enlèvement d'Hélène

L'Enlèvement d'Hélène
Authors: Collouthos, P. Orsini
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."

But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox: <blockquote> He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity. </blockquote> Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried

Book Description

G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.

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Widely considered as Chesterton's masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) defies classification. Subtitled 'A nightmare' by Chesterton, on one level it is a fast-moving and surreal detective story. Drawing on contemporary fears of anarchist conspiracies and bomb outrages, The Man Who Was Thursday is firmly rooted in its time and place - turn-of-the-century London - but it also defies temporal boundaries. Police Detective Syme finds himself drawn into a world that seems to have gone beyond humanity when he is elected 'Thursday', one of the members of the Central European Council of seven monarchs. Dreamlike, prophetic, and frequently funny, the novel attacks contemporary pessimism and, through a bizarre series of pursuits and unmaskings, returns Syme - and us - to earth more aware of its beauty, promise, and creative potential.

Customer Review L'Iliade, tome 4 : Chants XIX-XXIV

L'Iliade, tome 4 : Chants XIX-XXIV

Authors: Homère, Collectif
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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ringtone88.com from them..." Page 180. For someone in any capacity of religious or poiltical authority, who abuse their power and overlook their fallibility, to be privy to an act of evil (you choose what evil) and yet stay stoned silent, that is where that Light needs to seep into. Let not pride or the haughty veneer of what one is or desires to be prevent that.

In order to accept faith, one must know fully what he or she is, and that is what makes the novel so uplifting and jolly; it is an optimistic novel, because it mocks the bleakness of nihilism. Chesterton even has the happy-go-lucky audacity of inserting himself in the novel, but he does so with the full knowledge of where he came from, and where, in the end of life, he is fortunately going towards. "Chesterton is so thrilled by his acrobatic stroll along the razor's edge of nihilism that he earns hus sunniness a new on every page."--xvi. It is because he was never alone. We do seem to forget that every now and then.
Mind-warping and mind-expanding!.......2007-03-22
The Man Who Was Thursday is a Christian allegory, but it is not a simple allegory of the Christian faith, ala The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. This book is an allegory by a Christian thinker, for Christians. The Anarchists of this book are not the real-life bomb-throwers, but represent free will - the freedom to do evil. The policemen represent the Christian's desires to reign in the evil, and Sunday represents the Universe, the ultimate giver of good and evil.

Is this a great philosophical work, a key to understanding the ultimate nature of God? Well, you'll have to read that and decide for yourself. As for me, I found it to be a fascinating and at time unsettling work. It's easy to see why this book is considered a Christian classic, and its also easy to see why so many people read it and declare that they had no idea what it was about.

This is another one of those mind-warping book that is difficult to understand, but mind-expanding as you begin to grasp what the author is saying. I highly recommend this book!
Thursday's Child has far to go.......2007-01-30
The plot of this book is crafted with mechanical precision. Start to read and you've pulled the switch and it all gets rolling. Each word, sentence and paragraph accumulates into a picturesque ride moving initially at a cruising pace. Then the story continues to develop page-by-page gaining momentum and the reader at warp speed is drawn completely into Chesterton's improbable world. It is a not so subtle allegory of broadly drawn characters and events informed by what I interpret as the author's deeply held religious convictions. Here is planet Earth and the jolly, impish God overseeing every little thing of his creation. It's rough out there all right but hard work and great fortitude will see us mortals through. This is just what Thursday and the other bogus "anarchists" find through all their trials and lunacy. The Man Who was Thursday is not a great book (there are many people that think it is) but it is entertaining; clever through rather sophmoric. It occurred to me that the old Monty Python gang could have made it into a great movie that would have done justice to its zaniness. Maybe Tim Burton?

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First Time's The Charm

Lethem in the rough

Great First Novel

Would you believe it?

Over the top, but...

Gun, with Occasional Music (Harvest Book)
Jonathan Lethem
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel

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ASIN: 0156028972

Book Description

Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems-there's a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.
Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse.
Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

Customer Reviews:

First Time's The Charm.......2007-03-08
Lethem's first book doesn't crackle and sparkle with the literary virtuosity of his later works ("Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude"), but it is a fine example of the nimbleness of his creative spirit.

"Gun" follows private inquisitor, Conrad Metcalf, around a futuristic California, where animals and babies are forcibly evolved, societal compliance is enforced with measurable karma, and it is no longer acceptable to ask questions. Metcalf's latest client has been killed, and the case is being pasted to a patsy by the big dogs in the government pound. Metcalf makes things uncomfortable (for himself as well as everyone else) in his pursuit to uncover the truth.

It's not an easy task. Metcalf is dogged by a trigger-happy kangaroo, the loss of his masculine nerve endings (literally), and people who take legally-sanctioned drugs designed to induce amnesia. He skims off the dross with typical flat-footed panache, employing the standard P.I. lingo (and glum stubborness) made famous by Chandler and Bogey (although not with quite as much skill).

Although, at heart, this is a tribute to the world of literary noir, Lethem gives us a glimpse of his future import by sewing hefty totems into his weird (but fully realized) world. Orwell it ain't, but it sure comes close; Lethem has more to say about how we enslave ourselves, rather than how others do the enslaving for us.

By turns funny and fast-paced, clever and creepy, slick and sharp, "Gun" is a great diversion. It's certainly not an example of an artist at the top of his game, but it IS an example of an artist learning quite deftly how to break all of the rules. More than anything else, this is Lethem showing us just why he's a writer to begin with -- because he loves it. In the hands of someone as talented as he, it's hard for a reader not to share his enthusiasm.
Lethem in the rough.......2007-01-24
It seems that all I ever read these days is Jonathan Lethem and bizarro authors like Carlton Mellick III. The bizarro guys are pretty good and fun to read in a freaky surreal-ish kind of way, but they aren't master craftsmen of the written word. Lethem is. Gun, with Occasional Music is his first book, but probably the 7th I have read. After getting used to the style of his recent work I can really tell how strong his writing has become. He is an excellent author. Even with his first book, you can tell he is an excellent author. But he has definitely improved over time Les Métamorphoses, tome 1 : Livres I-V

Les Métamorphoses, tome 1 : Livres I-V

Authors: Ovid
Catalog: Book
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Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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ODYSSEE T3 CHANTS XVI-XXIV

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ASIN: 3865212735
Release Date: 2006-09-15
Book Description
Growing up in Ohio in the 1970s, photographer Marc Joseph was first exposed to art, writing and music in the eccentric smaller book and record shops of downtown Cleveland. Most Saturday afternoons were spent combing through the stacks in anticipation of a major future purchase--like his first, London Calling by the Clash--or studying certain talismanic book covers like George Orwell's Animal Farm or Allen Ginsberg's Howl. This was the beginning of Joseph's permanent fascination with books and records--both as public artworks and as formative private experiences.

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Scholarly wisdom

Not Recommended

Doesn't stack up

Why do they print this stuff?

Quirky little love triangle

As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel
Jonathan Lethem
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0375700129
Release Date: 1998-02-24

Amazon.com
Particle physics, false vacuum bubbles, an alternate universe--this is the stuff of Jonathan Lethem's novel As She Climbed Across the Table. The tale echoes Alice in Wonderland in its mad tumble through a rearranged reality. Narrator Phillip Engstrand is a university professor who has made a career out of studying academic environments. Engstrand is in love with Alice Coombs, a particle physicist engaged in a bold attempt to replicate the origins of the universe. The result of the experiment is Lack, a very selective black hole that sucks some things into its void--a cat, a pair of socks, a strawberry--and rejects others, namely, a love-struck Alice. As Alice's unrequited obsession with Lack grows, Phillip becomes so desperate to save his beloved from this empty rival that he risks a journey down the metaphysical rabbit hole.
Here the language of physics becomes the language of love: describing physics' "observer problem," Alice says, "Some people think the observer's consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron." Later, as he stumbles to explain Alice's importance to him, Phillip tells her, "I'm not sure I really exist except under your observation." In this memorable little book, Lethem explores the cosmic possibilities of love.
Book Description
Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.

The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a novel of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.

Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as "American Magical Realism."

From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:

Scholarly wisdom.......2007-02-21
I'm not sure what to think of Jonathan Lethem these days - each work I read by him is, for a time, effortless, close to perfect, and then finds itself veering into a land of bad bad choices. Reading his The Fortress of Solitude, I was left to wonder what the book would have been like if it were simply kept as its electrifying first half, instead of allowed to wander, halfheartedly, into its characters' imagined futures. A similar sensation takes hold in As She Climbed Across The Table - it's not that what becomes of its characters is bad, per se, as much as it is simply ignorant of the novel's wondeful strengths. The book doesn't conclude, per se, doesn't quite complete its central love story - a bizarre love triangle in which Alice, the main character's girlfriend, is drawn away by a hyperactive physics blackhole called Lack - nor does it quite fulfill it, as a first glance at its ambiguous, artsy ending might assume. That's an interesting choice, to be certain, but it also ignores what the book does right. That's because As She Climbed... is effortless not as a love story, but as a breezy satire on academic life. It trots in a revolving door of bizarre academic types, each using Lack - which is, clearly and repeatedly stated, a giant nothing - as a springboard to represent their own attempts at fulfillment, their own need to "get" a situation. Its characters - named in bizarro Pynchon-esque monikers like Georges DeTooth, Dr. Soft, Carmo Braxia, Gavin Flapcloth (!) - are then a wild evocation of pretention in action, a goofy take on collegiate pretentions. There's not much of a sense about Philip Engstrand, a pleasant enough lovestruck protagonist, but its love story itself is a bit of a pleasantry meant to present the lack in its characters' own self-images that make its lunacy possible. All of that leaves this novel breezy, easy to read, fun, and not much of anything. Still, its goofiness is a treasure, especially climaxing in the actions and reactions around DeTooth, the wigged, deluded deconstructionist who explains to a physicist that his response to Lack is to, "compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will consist of only the word 'lack.'" The physicist's response is to start vomiting.
Not Recommended.......2007-01-27
I'll keep this brief. This book seems like it's trying to be weird for the sake of weirdness. Skip this one and try Lethem's other books, like "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude."
Doesn't stack up.......2006-09-21
Two of Lethem's prior works, "Gun with Occasional Music" and "Amnesia Moon", offer so much more to the reader than "As She Climbed Across the Table". The earlier novels had characters that were likable or despicable--at least they were interesting. The worlds of those other books were the product of an active imagination.

"As She Climbed Across the Table" manages to annoy where his earlier works captivated. The characters aren't interesting or likable and the setting is a modern-day American University. There's nothing to grab the user and make them love anything about the book.

Lethem throws in some random science talk in the last chapter to allow the book to be called science fiction. Otherwise, it's a soap opera--and a boring one at that.
Why do they print this stuff?.......2006-08-20
I might be classified as a slightly practical reader, which may explain my dislike of this book. However, unless you have acquired a taste for the highly abstract literature, you likely will dislike this book.

I swear I have tried to find some deeper meaning, someway to find a redeeming feature in this book - and have found none. The plot is not clever, the conversation is not funny or insightful, it is quite Lettres d'amour

Lettres d'amour

Authors: Aristénète, J.-R. Vieillefond
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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ODYSSEE T3 CHANTS XVI-XXIV

Plaidoyers civils, tome 3 : Discours 49-61

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Plaidoyers politiques, tome 1 : Contre Androtion - Contre la loi de Leptine - Contre Timocrate, 2e tirage

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ringtone88.com even more wonder, even if that wonder is more head-scratching than revelatory.

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On the moon...

One of Jackson's best, almost.

Oh, What a Great B&W Movie This Would Make

Captivating....

Amazing psychological thriller

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Shirley Jackson
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Visitors call seldom at Blackwood House. Taking tea at the scene of a multiple poisoning, with a suspected murderess as one's host, is a perilous business. For a start, the talk tends to turn to arsenic. "It happened in this very room, and we still have our dinner in here every night," explains Uncle Julian, continually rehearsing the details of the fatal family meal. "My sister made these this morning," says Merricat, politely proffering a plate of rum cakes, fresh from the poisoner's kitchen. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson's 1962 novel, is full of a macabre and sinister humor, and Merricat herself, its amiable narrator, is one of the great unhinged heroines of literature. "What place would be better for us than this?" she asks, of the neat, secluded realm she shares with her uncle and with her beloved older sister, Constance. "Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people." Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic, burying talismanic objects beneath the family estate, nailing them to trees, ritually revisiting them. She has made "a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us" against the distrust and hostility of neighboring villagers.
Or so she believes. But at last the magic fails. A stranger arrives--cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune. He disturbs the sisters' careful habits, installing himself at the head of the family table, unearthing Merricat's treasures, talking privately to Constance about "normal lives" and "boy friends." Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods. The result is crisis and tragedy, the revelation of a terrible secret, the convergence of the villagers upon the house, and a spectacular unleashing of collective spite.
The sisters are propelled further into seclusion and solipsism, abandoning "time and the orderly pattern of our old days" in favor of an ever-narrowing circuit of ritual and shadow. They have themselves become talismans, to be alternately demonized and propitiated, darkly, with gifts. Jackson's novel emerges less as a study in eccentricity and more--like some of her other fictions--as a powerful critique of the anxious, ruthless processes involved in the maintenance of normality itself. "Poor strangers," says Merricat contentedly at last, studying trespassers from the darkness behind the barricaded Blackwood windows. "They have so much to be afraid of." --Sarah Waters
Book Description
Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
Customer Reviews:

On the moon..........2007-05-31
While certainly not as well-known as her famous short story "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson's novel "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" is still a great work in its own right; one worth reading and savoring. A word of warning however; this is not a who-dunit or a psychological thriller, as some readers might think. Don't expect shocking plot twists, morally-grounded characters, or a neatly resolved ending. This is, instead, a powerful and hauntingly beautiful exploration of madness, culpibility and family dysfunction closer to Patricia Highsmith and Lovecraft (see "The Outsider" and "The Tomb") than Agatha Christie. At the center of it all is the wildly disturbed, and strangely likable, Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood, whose psyche is gradually revealed to the reader throughout the novel. At times loving, cruel, innocent, hateful, tender and controlling, Merricat is above all facinating. Jackson definitely shows true literary genius, balancing reality and fantasy to create an unforgettable story. If you prefer interesting characters, real psychological tension and a rich gothic atmosphere over the conventions of the suspense/thriller genre, read this book.

One of Jackson's best, almost........2006-08-07
This novel, written by the Stephen King of her day is a psychological horror story. About two young women who are forced to live alone by cruel townspeople. Then one day the older is seduced by a cousin appearing as a "friend." Although not as good as two of the author's most famous works "Lottery, Haunting of Hill House." The characters are very well drawn and the writing disturbing. In fact there is one scene in the book that was very similar to one I had and was so affected by it that I almost "lost" the novel.
Oh, What a Great B&W Movie This Would Make.......2006-06-26
If someone could be described as deliciously evil, I guess it would be Constance Blackwood -- never eat her food if you reviled her good nature.

The central characters are Constance -- a late 20's spinster matriarch -- who tends to a few surviving relatives. Before the times outlined in this book, a meal Constance had prepared poisoned her mother, her father, her aunt and her uncle. Her uncle lived, but extremely infirmed. Her teenage sister Merricat (Katherine) lived without infirmity -- for reasons we learn later in the book.

The people are polite in a Victorian way. Merricat is tomboyish like Scout of "To Kill a Mockingbird." With the vast land holdings, Merricat's world is her "Secret Garden." Their world is brilliantly innocent in the land and home provided by their dearly deceased parents. Yet, their poisonous meal is complicatingly ferocious and conniving.

Constance's inner feelings about her place with the family are slowly revealed to us. But, not entirely. Much like the painting movements of the middle 20th century, this 1960's novel's minimalist disclosure of the girls' characters and reasons for Constance's murderous actions are the mastery of the art to which we view.

Many of the items herein may be symbolism at its sublest. Written post-McCarthyism era, the rioting judgmental crowd may symbolize more than small people with small minds. Constance may be more than a young spinster who is tired of parental pressures.

This is a page-turning book. Short in length, and fast in style, Jackson delivers a ghoulish, eerie, and creepy experience to us. Oh, what a great black and white movie this would make.
Captivating...........2006-04-21
This is a captivating and hard to put down book. Needless to say I read it in one sitting. The writing transports you to a wo ODYSSEE T3 CHANTS XVI-XXIV

ODYSSEE T3 CHANTS XVI-XXIV

Authors: Homère
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 15 February, 2003
Publisher: Les Belles Lettres
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