Home
sign up| reviews / editor book review |
 content by: editor |
Short stories of not-so-superheroes. Like a call and response riff lifted from one of his favoured new wave bands, Lethem answers last year’s sprawling wonder, The Fortress Of Solitude, with an almost penitently slim collection of nine stories. Veering between realism, ambitious science fiction and all points absurdist in between, there is of course plenty of room leftover for superheroes (such as Super Goat Man, a failed hero with equally hopeless nemeses like Vest Man and False Dave) and their ironically mundane lives - a fascination which is never far from the author’s heart. However, in this instance, it’s with his non-superhero intimations of surreality, bulging from behind the curtain of the everyday - as in The Glasses, where a black Brooklynite and two white opticians move fluently through a cycle of distrust, suspected prejudice and détente, or The Spray’s moving twist from farce into failed love’s sorrow - that Lethem impresses most. Men And Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem, out now published by Faber.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
art  art archive Watch artist interviews and see images from British exhibitions. |
send to a friend
access 1000s of articles