Audiobooks by Jonathan Lethem

Now a major motion picture from Warner Bros. Starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Willem Dafoe 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 Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart 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, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside down, 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. A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Frank Muller (Narrator)

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A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face. Handsome, impeccably tuxedoed Bruno Alexander travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur "whales" who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon. Fronted by his pasty, vampiric manager, Edgar Falk, Bruno arrives in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore. Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board sideways. Things don't go much better in Berlin. Bruno's flirtation with Madchen, the striking blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game at the unsettling Herr Kohler's mansion goes awry as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing diagnosis. Having run through Falk's money, Bruno turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental surgery that might save his life. Berkeley, where Bruno discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed never to return. Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira's come-ons and Keith's machinations, Bruno confronts two existential questions: Is the gambler being played by life? And what if you're telepathic but it doesn't do you any good?

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

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Lucky Alan: And Other Stories

The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine brilliant stories that prove he is a master of the short form as well as the novel. Jonathan Lethem stretches new literary muscles in this scintillating new collection of stories. Some of these tales-such as 'Pending Vegan,' which wonderfully captures a parental ache and anguish during a family visit to an aquatic theme park-are, in Lethem's words, 'obedient (at least outwardly) to realism.' Others, like 'The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear,', which deftly and hilariously captures the solipsism of blog culture, feature 'the uncanny and surreal elements that still sometimes erupt in my short stories.' The tension between these two approaches, and the way they inform each other, increase the reader's surprise and delight as one realizes how cleverly Lethem is playing with form. Devoted fans of Lethem will recognize familiar themes and tropes-the anxiety of influence pushed to reduction ad absurdum in 'The King of Sentences'; a hapless outsider trying to summon up bravado in 'The Porn Critic;' characters from the comics stranded on a desert island; the necessity and the impossibility of action against authority in 'Procedure in Plain Air.' As always, Lethem's work, humor, and poignancy work in harmony; people strive desperately for connection through words and often misdirect deeds; and the sentences are glorious. Read by a Full Cast: "Lucky Alan" read by Mark Deakins "The King of Sentences" read by David Wain "Traveler Home" read by Mark Deakins "Procedure in Plain Air" read by Amy Landecker "Their Back Pages" read by Isaac Butler "The Porn Critic" read by Bruce Wagner "The Empty Room" read by Michael Goldstrom "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear" read by Jonathan Lethem "Pending Vegan" read by Mark Deakins

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Various Narrators (Narrator)

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The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

A dead man is brought back to life so he can support his family in "The Happy Man"; occasionally he slips into a zombielike state while his soul is tortured in Hell. In "Vanilla Dunk," future basketball players are given the skills of old-time stars like Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. And in "Forever, Said the Duck," stored computer personalities scheme to break free of their owners. In these and other stories in this striking collection, Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, draws the reader ever more deeply into his strange, unforgettable world—a trip from which there may be no easy return.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Graham Winton, Kevin R. Free (Narrator)

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Motherless Brooklyn

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 Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart 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, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, 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. A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Geoffrey Cantor (Narrator)

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Dissident Gardens: A Novel

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicalsAt 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 who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose's influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, 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. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem's characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream 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. Lethem's characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is at its mesmerizing, beating heart about love.From the Hardcover edition.

Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Lethen (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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The Ecstasy of Influence

What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture sup-posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the "white elephant" role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers. A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth-ers. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Jonathan Lethem (Narrator)

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Chronic City

The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.From the Hardcover edition.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

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Amnesia Moon

Often favorably compared to contemporaries Michael Chabon and Lev Grossman, New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Lethem won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In his post-apocalyptic novel Amnesia Moon, he introduces a young man named Chaos who can seemingly remake reality in his dreams. Setting off on a grand adventure, Chaos attempts to learn the secrets behind the world's destruction. "Lethem tempers a liberal dose of quirky surrealism with interesting, believable characterizations and a compelling, imaginative story line."-Booklist

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Scott Sowers (Narrator)

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Gun, with Occasional Music

Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems—not the least of which are the rabbit in his waiting room and the trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is an ominous place where evolved animals function as members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage. In this brave new world, Metcalf has been shadowing the wife of an affluent doctor, perhaps falling a little in love with her at the same time. But when the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in the crossfire in a futuristic world that is both funny—and not so funny. “This colorful first novel is a fast and lively read, full of humorous visions and outlandish predicaments.” --Publishers Weekly

Jonathan Lethem (Author), Nick Sullivan (Narrator)

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Girl in Landscape

Anyone who wonders why Jonathan Lethem is the only novelist to be included among Newsweek's "100 People for the New Century" need only read his deliriously original new book, a science fiction/Western that combines the tragic momentum of The Searchers with the sexual tension of Lolita. At the age of 13, Pella Marsh emigrates with her family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. These enigmatic aborigines have names like Lonely Dumptruck and and Hiding Kneel--and a civilization that baffles and frightens their human visitors. As the spikily independent Pella becomes an uneasy envoy between two species, Girl in Landscape deftly interweaves themes of exploration and otherness, loss and sexual awakening.

Jonathan Lethem (Author), David Aaron Baker (Narrator)

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As She Climbed Across the Table

Jonathan Lethem (Author), David Aaron Baker (Narrator)

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