Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude

(Hardback)

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Description

In honour of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn- a beautifully published Everyman's Library hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America's most inventive novelists. Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

Reviews

Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora. * Newsweek *
Utterly original and deeply moving * Esquire *

The Fortress of Solitude:
One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings to it a story worth telling.

* Time *
In The Fortress of Solitude (Lethem's) love of Brooklyn suffuses every paragraph; his understanding of the dynamics of inner-city life is equally sharp whether he is describing a game of handball, a routine mugging or a shoplifting jaunt. Rarely has the anxious adventure of childhood been evoked better. * Guardian *

Author Bio

JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among other publications.