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New and Selected Stories
A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form. "Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem's stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay" (Chicago Tribune).
This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. A major new story, "The Red Sun School of Thoughts," never published elsewhere, follows a teenaged boy coming to terms with figures of authority and power—those both in his own biological family and in the family he creates for himself.
Elsewhere we meet "Super Goat Man," a down-at-heels bohemian superhero; "The Porn Critic," whose accidental expertise wrecks his own romantic aspirations; and "Sleepy People," who pose interpersonal conundrums without ever rousing from their slumber. Fluidly moving between realism and the surreal, the absurd and the mundane, A Different Kind of Tension is a container bursting with life and death, couples in trouble, talking animals, technologies on the fritz. Through it all are people longing to be seen and to connect; to thrive, love, and be forgiven. "This is the joy of reading Jonathan Lethem: you never know what you're going to get" (Financial Times).
"A late-midcareer retrospective, 30 stories spanning 35 years of work by a talented and celebrated writer...As always, Lethem is broadly curious, genre-promiscuous, and genuinely unpredictable; he ranges, so his stories do, too...Inventive, unpredictable fun." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A revelatory career-spanning collection of 30 fantastical and speculative stories...The repeating motifs—claustrophobia, desire, malevolent chaos—provide keys to understanding Lethem's often elliptical tales. The author's fans will find much to love." —Publishers Weekly
"Lethem has long been among the most distinctive voices in American letters. His unique blend of neo-noir, techno-futurist dystopia, and sociopolitical satire is well represented in this essential collection...Lethem's prodigious imagination and clever wordplay permeate each story, building both reality-adjacent and surrealist worlds with a playful wink." —Booklist
"I'm smitten with this collection, which feels as essential as The Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn. Thirty-five years of asynchronous pleasure! Here is Lethem at his mind-melting best—as counter-clock-world builder, merry dystopian, king of sentences." —Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams
This information about A Different Kind of Tension was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Brooklyn Crime Novel, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His five story collections include Men and Cartoons and Lucky Alan, and his short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Paris Review, among other publications, garnering a Pushcart Prize, a World Fantasy Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Los Angeles and Maine.
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