In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans. It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they...

Exchanging love letters with a fiancée who is trapped on the Space Station, Chase Insteadman apathetically attends social engagements before pop critic Perkus Tooth introduces him to a side of Manhattan that causes Chase to question everything he believes.

On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear...

Lionel Essrog, a detective who has Tourette syndrome, works for Frank Minna, a small-time neighborhood owner of a seedy detective agency. When Frank is shot with his own gun, Lionel and three others set out to investigate the crime.

Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose's suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain...

"Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm....

Presents a collection of short stories by the famed science fiction author.

As words and stories are increasingly disseminated through digital means, the significance of the book as object, whether pristine collectible or battered relic, is growing as well. This book spotlights the personal libraries of thirteen favorite novelists who share their collections with readers. Photographs provide full views of the libraries and close-ups of individual volumes: first editions, worn textbooks, pristine hardcovers, and childhood...

Twenty original essays by Katie Roiphe, Susan Choi, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Emily Barton, Michael Thomas, and other authors pay tribute to Brooklyn and the unique quality, character, and diversity of the borough.