A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories
Jonathan Lethem
What The Reviewers Say
Positive
Some of the pieces are little more than exercises ... Others remind us how consistently ambitious Lethem has been in his practice of the short form ... Program’s Progress’ is an entertaining satirical allegory ... As a short-fiction writer, Lethem was at his strongest — his most limber, lucid, inventive and wise — for around a decade starting in the early to mid-2000s ... The Empty Room,a delicious fable about domestic clutter … resembles a Don DeLillo take on Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? ... A good Lethem story exhausts the juiciest permutations of a scenario while managing not to outstay its welcome ... Wickedly unnerving ... Excellent.
Comprehensive and compelling, a career retrospective befitting one of our most perceptive and agile contemporary writers ... Both an introduction, for those unfamiliar with Lethem’s work, and a summation, the kind of tome one could imagine being taught in a university classroom ... One must admire Lethem’s near-Pynchonian turn: recede, defer, and allow the work to speak for itself ... Art really isn’t something to be mastered, of course, but Lethem’s dedication to the short story has paid dividends ... For my money, Lethem is at his most delightful when he’s vaguely hallucinatory ... Lethem excels at leaving the reader wondering ... Much of his best fiction holds up a dark mirror to the modern age.
Revelatory ... In large doses, the effect can be exhausting, but the repeating motifs—claustrophobia, desire, malevolent chaos—provide keys to understanding Lethem’s often elliptical tales. The author’s fans will find much to love.
