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Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude

Introduction by Charles Yu

Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series

Author Jonathan Lethem
Introduction by Charles Yu
$38.00 US
Knopf | Everyman's Library
12 per carton
On sale Sep 03, 2024 | 978-1-101-90848-8
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
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In honor of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn—a hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America’s most inventive novelists

Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourette’s symptoms drive him to rip apart language in startling and evocative ways. Charismatic Brooklyn mobster Frank Minna serves as a father figure to Lionel and three of his fellow veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, employing them in his limo service and detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel’s world is turned topsy-turvy, and he sets out to untangle the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of two motherless boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, growing up as neighbors in 1970s Brooklyn. Because Dylan is white and Mingus is Black, their friendship is not simple. Neither is their neighborhood, where the entertainments range from muggings to joyous games of stoopball, and where the smallest decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid seated next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential disaster. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys’ friendship, Jonathan Lethem weaves a rich and emotionally gripping story that encompasses race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti, incarceration, loyalty, and memory. 

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Praise for Motherless Brooklyn

“A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story . . .The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity . . . Unexpectedly moving.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A novel about the mysteries of consciousness . . . It immerses us in the mind’s dense thicket, a place where words split and twine in an ever-deepening tangle.” —The New York Book Review
 
Praise for The Fortress of Solitude
 
“Magnificent . . . A massively ambitious, profoundly accomplished novel.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Glorious, chaotic, raw . . . Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings to it a story worth telling.” —Time

“Lethem helped to remap contemporary fiction, erasing boundaries, revealing new rivers and streams, places with good vistas and fertile soil, places to build from and expand. Sometime early this century, the capital of literary moved from realism to a far-flung outpost in the genres. Lethem was at the frontier.” —from the Introduction by Charles Yu

About

In honor of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn—a hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America’s most inventive novelists

Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourette’s symptoms drive him to rip apart language in startling and evocative ways. Charismatic Brooklyn mobster Frank Minna serves as a father figure to Lionel and three of his fellow veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, employing them in his limo service and detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel’s world is turned topsy-turvy, and he sets out to untangle the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of two motherless boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, growing up as neighbors in 1970s Brooklyn. Because Dylan is white and Mingus is Black, their friendship is not simple. Neither is their neighborhood, where the entertainments range from muggings to joyous games of stoopball, and where the smallest decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid seated next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential disaster. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys’ friendship, Jonathan Lethem weaves a rich and emotionally gripping story that encompasses race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti, incarceration, loyalty, and memory. 

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Praise

Praise for Motherless Brooklyn

“A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story . . .The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity . . . Unexpectedly moving.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A novel about the mysteries of consciousness . . . It immerses us in the mind’s dense thicket, a place where words split and twine in an ever-deepening tangle.” —The New York Book Review
 
Praise for The Fortress of Solitude
 
“Magnificent . . . A massively ambitious, profoundly accomplished novel.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Glorious, chaotic, raw . . . Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings to it a story worth telling.” —Time

“Lethem helped to remap contemporary fiction, erasing boundaries, revealing new rivers and streams, places with good vistas and fertile soil, places to build from and expand. Sometime early this century, the capital of literary moved from realism to a far-flung outpost in the genres. Lethem was at the frontier.” —from the Introduction by Charles Yu

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