[PDF] Motherless Brooklyn eBook

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 10,72 MB
Release : 2011-04-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307789128

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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist. "A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving." —The Boston Globe Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our 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 Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, 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. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original, captivating homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,88 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.).
ISBN : 9780385491648

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A black comedy in New York's criminal underworld. The twitching hero--he suffers from Tourette's syndrome--is one of four misfits who were rescued from an orphanage by a man who gave them jobs in his detective agency. Now the man has been killed and the boys intend to get the killer.

Author : Robert A. Caro
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 1338 pages
File Size : 18,87 MB
Release : 1974-07-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0394480767

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York. One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man—an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches—and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear—his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"—a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses—an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time—without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder. This is how he built and dominated New York—before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 530 pages
File Size : 30,52 MB
Release : 2004-09-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1400095344

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A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Walker in the City, and Call it Sleep." --The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." --Time

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 38,59 MB
Release : 2011-04-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307791777

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Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Atlantic Books
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 45,66 MB
Release : 2018-11-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1786497506

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'A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist - a laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer - to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble - caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous... Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 32,9 MB
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0385532156

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A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. A searing and wildly entertaining love letter to New York City from the bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude. Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan. Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price. "Full of dark humor and dazzling writing" --Entertainment Weekly

Author : Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 18,42 MB
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374602158

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A National Book Award Finalist, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's enchanting and inventive first novel is a groundbreaking, contemporary classic When a girl falls into a mysterious, impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. Madeleine, the dreamer, travels in their midst, trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis. She leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love. Embracing the earthy and the ethereal, the comical and the poignant, Madeleine Is Sleeping is part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, and above all, an adventure in the discovery of art, sexuality, community, and the self.

Author : Anthony LaSala
Publisher : powerHouse Books
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 36,21 MB
Release : 2007-07-01
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9781576873984

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"Brooklyn is the conscience of New York. While Manhattan tears everything down and changes everything, Brooklyn does a similar thing, but fails miserably at it. It is a crazy quilt of a place. A mongrel place of sorts. It mixes old and modern in a haphazard way. It represents a tiny microcosm of the world-functional utopia." -Jonathan Lethem A complex and quixotic urban animal found ranging across southeast New York City, the Brooklynite has obtained a sort of mythological status, representing the "you tawkin' to me?" attitude for which the city is world-renowned. For over three years, writer Anthony LaSala and photographer Seth Kushner trekked tirelessly across the borough, documenting these charismatic characters in The Brooklynites, a collection of images, interviews, and essays. Kushner and LaSala, native Brooklynites themselves, sought out the famous and the nameless, current residents and former inhabitants, providing a profoundly comprehensive portrait of both the metropolis and its denizens. Featuring the likes of Paul Auster, Spike Lee, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Sufjan Stevens, John Turturro, Casey Spooner, Steve Schirripa, Matisyahu, and Jonathan Lethem-as well as local heroes-The Brooklynites features figures from the widely diverse neighborhoods of the city's most populous borough: Brooklyn Heights, Bay Ridge, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bensonhurst, Boerum Hill, Brighton Beach, Brownsville, Bushwick, Canarsie, Carroll Gardens, Clinton Hill, Coney Island, DUMBO, Dyker Heights, East New York, Flatbush, Flatlands, Fort Greene, Gowanus, Gravesend, Greenpoint, Manhattan Beach, Marine Park, Midwood, Mill Basin, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Red Hook, Sheepshead Bay, Sunset Park, and Williamsburg. With a population of 2.5 million people, Brooklyn is one of the most celebrated locales in all the world. Its landmarks (The Brooklyn Bridge, Greenwood Cemetery), renowned neighborhoods (Coney Island, Park Slope), history (The Brooklyn Dodgers) and institutions (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Prospect Park) are recognized in every corner of the globe while its stories and legends have been recounted in hundreds of famous novels (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Motherless Brooklyn, Last Exit to Brooklyn), television shows (The Cosby Show), theater productions (BKLYN the musical) and films (Saturday Night Fever, Crooklyn). The Brooklynites gives readers an all-inclusive tour of the "home to everyone from everywhere": Brooklyn, New York.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 37,47 MB
Release : 1995-01-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780312858780

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Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.