Jonathan Lethem is the author of As She Climbed Across the Table, Amnesia Moon, and Motherless Brooklyn. He has been listed by Newsweek as one of their '100 People for the New Century'. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
How to Make a Bomb (2024) Rupert Thomson "I devoured [this book] in a single sitting. The sense of dislocation - and location - made it seem like a dream of another life, all of it so lyrical and yet narratively acute. A wonderful achievement."
James (2024) Percival Everett "Percival Everett is an audacious, beguiling American master, whose wild trajectory has reached astonishing highs in the past decade. Now comes James, which enlists and devours not only Mark Twain's novel but aspects of Melville, Ellison, and even Kafka to makes an irrevocable intervention into the canon. Everett is simply playing this game at a higher level, and it is the most serious game imaginable."
Headshot (2024) Rita Bullwinkel "As blazing and distinctive a performance as I've beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel's figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters' bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I'm amazed."
Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) Ed Park "Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered by Ed Park's mysterious, panoramic novel. Itseems to draw on Bolano, Pynchon, and DeWitt for its radical structure, yet remains grounded in a droll, sweet voice we've wished to hear again since Personal Days. This is a Gravity's Rainbow for another war, an unfinished war. Having been enlisted in the Korean Provisional Government, I now await my instructions."
Trouble the Living (2023) Francesca McDonnell Capossela "Francesca Capossela is a startling new talent, elegant, erudite, humane, and with a true novelist's sense of form and proportion. Her debut straddles continents and generations with seemingly effortless lyricism and verve. Her exacting insight into the emotional dynamics of family is astonishing."
Oh God, the Sun Goes (2023) David Connor "An indescribable marvel ... A writer who will seemingly follow his intuitions anywhere, with blazing results."
Sing Her Down (2023) Ivy Pochoda "Sing Her Down is that rare novel that explodes your expectations from the very first page and goes on doing so until the end. Ivy Pochoda finds these characters at the root of their pain and desire. The prose is flayed and taut, the iconic episodes just keep stacking up, and the entirety has the epic intensity of a murder ballad."
The Nature Book (2023) Tom Comitta "Here it is at last, and what a bloody relief to at last have it: The Novel Without Us. Using the suprasensory medium of the human vessel Tom Comitta, the trees and sky and earth have accessed the hyperobject or hyperartifact known as 'literature' in order to be heard from, across time and space. This is a novel to dwarf all others."
My Nemesis (2023) Charmaine Craig "Charmaine Craig's brilliant anatomization of mid-life art, identity, and infidelity shares in the intellectual grace and precision of its characters' philosophical pursuits, yet beneath the ruminative surface this book churns with desire and remorse."
Always Crashing in the Same Car (2023) Lance Olsen "Always Crashing in the Same Car presents a phantasmagorical mosaic of facts and fantasies concerning the life and art of David Bowie, for whom the mask always melted into the face and vice versa. A meditation on memory, loss, and love; on the projection of a writer's self through their chosen idols; on the artist's attempt to orchestrate the manner of a life's conclusion. All this, Lance Olsen delivers, and more."
The Furrows (2022) Namwali Serpell "Namwali Serpell's deep unity of imagery and voice is at the employ of a wild talent for narrative pivot and surprise; what seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story. The final pages take flight with visionary intensity. The Furrows is a genuine tour de force."
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022) James Hannaham "As if by means of some mashup of Hubert Selby, Darius James, and Bruce Wagner, James Hannaham's tripwire provocations and dazzling verbal fireworks give way to a fathomless tenderness and remorse. His Carlotta is spectacularly Brooklyn and devastatingly human all the way down to the bone."
Another Love Discourse (2022) Edie Meidav "Another Love Discourse is an uncategorizable triumph, and a gesture of radical intimacy with the reader, one of which Barthes would be proud."
Mouth to Mouth (2022) Antoine Wilson "Mouth to Mouth is that rarity, a perfect narrative machine, working by its own laws. The cool nervous clarity of the prose enmeshes the reader in a trap of complicity, one snapping shut on narrator and reader at the same instant. Bravo."
The Body Scout (2021) Lincoln Michel "The Body Scout is a fizzy and brilliant confabulation, an anticorporate extrapolative throwdown that is equal parts Pohl-and-Kornbluth and George Saunders, with loads of heart, a skewed and hilarious language all its own, and the audacity to propose that the New York Mets could win a World Series by competent skullduggery. I devoured it."
The First Law of Thermodynamics (2021) James Patrick Kelly "Against all law and likelihood, (he goes on) reinventing himself each time out, always questioning the basic premise of what a science fiction story can be, or a James Patrick Kelly story, or a story in the first place."
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (2021) Tom Lin "In Tom Lin’s novel, the atmosphere of Cormac McCarthy’s West, or that of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, gives way to the phantasmagorical shades of Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Yet The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu has a velocity and perspective all its own, and is a fierce new version of the Westward Dream. This is a superb novel that declares the arrival of an astonishing new voice."
Dead Souls (2021) Sam Riviere "Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading."
The House Uptown (2021) Melissa Ginsburg "Melissa Ginsburg's page-turner is a devastatingly simple trap: characters so beguiling you settle in for a charming coming-of-age fable before realizing the spring is snapping shut on an inexorable and satisfying calamity. The theme is the-past-isn't-dead-it-isn't-even-past, but painted not with Faulkner's heavy hand so much as with the crisp ingenuity of Ross Macdonald."
The Last Great Road Bum (2020) Héctor Tobar "Héctor Tobar uses every method at his disposal to encircle the facts of the ‘conspicuous gringo’ whose archive landed in his lap. I’m in awe of the results, an alchemical amalgam of tender portraiture and illuminating context, with a voice full of riffs and references, and charming as hell. Tobar can seemingly do anything as a writer; here he bridges fiction and nonfiction effortlessly."
Pew (2020) Catherine Lacey "The mercurial and electric Catherine Lacey has now conjured up an of-the-moment fable of trauma and projection – one part Kaspar Hauser, one part James Purdy, and one part Rachel Cusk. The pages shimmer with implication."
Watching You Without Me (2019) Lynn Coady "Watching You Without Me is like a Lorrie Moore book suffering a Patricia Highsmith fever dream. You slide right along on Coady's witty and endearing style, and meanwhile the trap has closed over you without your ever standing a chance."
Riots I Have Known (2019) Ryan Chapman "Ryan Chapman’s Riots I Have Known joins Rachel Kushner’s Mars Room on the short list of truly remarkable American prison novels. Chapman’s debut is literally riotous: an improbably beguiling, utterly ribald provocation, something like Lenny Bruce’s “Father Flotsky’s Triumph†as retold by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man."
I Hate the Internet (2016) Jarett Kobek "I just got an early copy of [Kobek's] newest, I Hate the Internet, and devoured it he's as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don't need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages."
The Complete Novels (2010) (Sailor and Lula) Barry Gifford "Barry Gifford invented his own American vernacular... William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly... to forge the stealth-epic of Sailor..."
Fugue State (2009) Brian Evenson "Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."
Lowboy (2009) John Wray "John Wray is the Next Wave of American fiction, and Lowboy, his crazy excavation of New York's underground, is brilliant."
Zeroville (2007) Steve Erickson "Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced."
One for Sorrow (2007) Christopher Barzak "Barzak's sympathy and humor, his awareness, his easeful vernacular storytelling, are extraordinary."
How the Dead Dream (2007) (How the Dead Dream, book 1) Lydia Millet "One of my favourite contemporary American writers."
Trance (2005) Christopher Sorrentino "TRANCE will be placed on the very highest shelf of that art which explains the 20th Century to the 21st."
360 Flip (2004) Molly McGrann "The book is terrific. I read it in a couple of compulsive gulps, and found [it] vertiginous, tragic and funny."
Vernon God Little (2003) D B C Pierre "Read Vernon God Little not only for its dangerous relevance, but for the coruscating wit and raw vitality of its voice..."
Stranger Things Happen (2001) Kelly Link "Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book."
Corrupting Dr Nice (1997) John Kessel "Lucid, humane, and mercilessly funny, Corrupting Dr. Nice is a peach. If there could be great date books like there are great date movies, this would be one. Brilliant."
More recommendations
Books containing stories by Jonathan Lethem
Sense of Wonder (2023) A Century of Science Fiction edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman
By the Book (2014) Writers On Literature and the Literary Life edited by Pamela Paul
Nebula Awards Showcase 2000 (2000) The Year's Best SF and Fantasy Chosen by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (Nebula Award Stories, book 34) edited by Gregory Benford
(b.1964)
