Author: Jonathan Lethem File Type: epub From Americas most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.Lionel Essrog is Brooklyns very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, 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. Vincents Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minnas 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 Lionels colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victims widow skips town. Lionels 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 homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.Amazon.com ReviewPop quiz. Please complete the following sentence There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I dont even recognize my own _. If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethems engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourettes syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincents Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (were talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while hes dying on the way to the hospital.Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the toothbrush passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethems dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionels Tourettes could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionels tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan BoudinotFrom Publishers WeeklyHard-boiled crime fiction has never seen the likes of Lionel Essrog, the barking, grunting, spasmodically twitching hero of Lethems gonzo detective novel that unfolds amidst the detritus of contemporary Brooklyn. As he did in his convention-smashing last novel, Girl in Landscape, Lethem uses a blueprint from genre fiction as a springboard for something entirely different, a story of betrayal and lost innocence that in both novels centers on an orphan struggling to make sense of an alien world. Raised in a boys home that straddles an off-ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lionel is a misfit among misfits an intellectually sensitive loner with a bad case of Tourettes syndrome, bristling with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. When the novel opens, Lionel has long since been rescued from the orphanage by a small-time wiseguy, Frank Minna, who hired Lionel and three other maladjusted boys to do odd jobs and to staff a dubious limo servicedetective agency on a Brooklyn main drag, creating a ragtag surrogate family for the four outcasts, each fiercely loyal to Minna. When Minna is abducted during a stakeout in uptown Manhattan and turns up stabbed to death in a dumpster, Lionel resolves to find his killer. Its a quest that leads him from a meditation center in Manhattan to a dusty Brooklyn townhouse owned by a couple of aging mobsters who just might be gay, to a zen retreat and sea urchin harvesting operation in Maine run by a nefarious Japanese corporation, and into the clutches of a Polish giant with a fondness for kumquats. In the process, Lionel finds that his compulsions actually make him a better detective, as he obsessively teases out plots within plots and clues within clues. Lethems title suggests a dense urban panorama, but this novel is more cartoonish and less startlingly original than his last. Lethems sixth sense for the secret enchantments of language and the psyche nevertheless make this heady adventure well worth the ride. Author tour. 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Alexander Cowan File Type: pdf About the AuthorAlexander Cowan is Senior Lecturer and Research Co-ordinator in History at Northumbria University, UK.

Author: WHW File Type: pdf

Author: Darcy O'Brien File Type: epub A compelling chronicle that uncovers the truth behind two ghastly crimes and lays bare the divided psyche of their perpetratorMurder in Little Egyptencompasses stunning material, says Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, that is handled with justice and fastidiousness by a natural storytellerThe unimaginable crime of filicide takes on the cast of tragic inevitability in this haunting true tale of violence, greed, revenge, and death. Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy OBrien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984.Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense.In the subsequent trial, however, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge. Throughout the three decades that he enjoyed the admiration and respect of his community, Cavaness was privately terrorizing his family, abusing his employees, and making disastrous financial investments as well as carousing, brawling, and womanizing.What was not revealed in the trial, however, was that seven years earlier, in a homicide that had never been officially solved, the body of Cavanesss firstborn son, Mark, had been found shot dead in the woods of Little Egypt.As more and more grisly details of the Cavaness case come to stark Midwestern light in OBriens chilling account, so too does the hidden gothic underside of rural America and its heritage of violence and blood.