Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude

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In honor of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn—a hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America’s most inventive novelists

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn’s self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourette’s symptoms drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel’s world is suddenly turned topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 

The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings and 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. 

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times. JONATHAN LETHEM is the bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

About the Introducer:  CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (winner of the 2020 National Book Award), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time Best Book of the Year). He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld.US

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