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Handsome, impeccably tuxedoed Bruno Alexander travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur "whales" who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon. Fronted by his pasty, vampiric manager, Edgar Falk, Bruno arrives in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore. Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board sideways.

Things don't go much better in Berlin. Bruno's flirtation with Madchen, the striking blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game at the unsettling Herr Kohler's mansion goes awry as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing diagnosis. Having run through Falk's money, Bruno turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental surgery that might save his life.

Berkeley, where Bruno discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed never to return. Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira's come-ons and Keith's machinations, Bruno confronts two existential questions: Is the gambler being played by life? And what if you're telepathic but it doesn't do you any good?

In Jonathan Lethem's wryly funny second novel, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.

It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.

Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has her boyfriend for nothing... nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice's spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of Gun, with Occasional Music.

Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste-tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws-because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

This story can be found in the following anthologies and collections:

• Nebula Awards 32
• The Vintage Book of Amnesia
• The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
• The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2

One the irrepressibly inventive Jonathan Lethem could weld science fiction and the Western into a mesmerizing novel of exploration and otherness, sexual awakening and loss. At the age of 13 Pella Marsh loses her mother and her home on the scorched husk that is planet Earth. Her sorrowing family emigrates to the Planet of the Archbuilders, whose mysterious inhabitants have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel--and a civilization that and frightens their human visitors.?

On this new world, spikily independent Pella becomes as uneasy envoy between two species. And at the same time is unwilling drawn to a violent loner who embodies all the paranoid machismo of the frontier ethic. Combining the tragic grandeur of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual tension of Lolita and transporting them to a planet light years, Girl in Landscape is a tour de force.

Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems-not the least of which are the rabbit in his waiting room and the trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is an ominous place where evolved animals function as members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage. In this brave new world, Metcalf has been shadowing the wife of an affluent doctor, perhaps falling a little in love with her at the same time. But when the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in the crossfire in a futuristic world that is both funny-and not so funny.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1996. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edtied by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
• Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (2008), edited by John Joseph Adams

The story is included in the collections The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (2002) and How We Got Insipid (2006).

Franz Kafka: by day, a mild-mannered insurance executive; by night a seminal Twentieth Century fabulist. Author of The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, Amerika.

Franz Kafka: Czech refugee, American screenwriter, painter of sad-eyed waifs, reclusive superhero with an identity problem. Associate of Frank Capra, Orson Welles, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, Gary Cooper, Rod Serling, and Roberto Begnini.

Franz Kafka: victim of an audacious, witty, hermetic, affectionate and shameless literary appropriation and reimagination by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz.

These five stories project Kafka into a modern America he never lived to see, but might have invented--a world of material wealth and spiritual vapidity, filled with the detritus of postwar culture: old comic books, Hollywood movies, and tacky paintings of crying children.

Table of Contents:

• Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor - (1993) - shortstory by Carter Scholz
• The Notebooks of Bob K. - (1999) - shortfiction by Jonathan Lethem
• Receding Horizon - (1995) - shortstory by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz
• The Amount to Carry - (1998) - novelette by Carter Scholz
• K for Fake - (1999) - shortfiction by Jonathan Lethem

The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine stories that demonstrate his mastery of the short form.

Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories uncovers a father's nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in "Pending Vegan"; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in "Traveler Home"; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in "Procedure in Plain Air"; and a crumbling, haunted "blog" on a seaside cliff in "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear." Each of these locates itself in Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting. As in his celebrated novels, Lethem finds the uncanny lurking in the mundane, the irrational self-defeat seeping through our upstanding pursuits, and the tragic undertow of the absurd world(s) in which we live.

Devoted fans of Lethem will recognize familiar themes: the anxiety of influence taken to reductio ad absurdum in "The King of Sentences"; a hapless, horny outsider summoning bravado in "The Porn Critic"; characters from forgotten comics stranded on a desert island in "Their Back Pages." As always in Lethem, humor and poignancy work in harmony, humans strive desperately for connection, words find themselves misaligned to deeds, and the sentences are glorious.

Table of Contents:

• Lucky Alan
• The King of Sentences
• Traveler Home
• Procedure in Plain Air
• Their Back Pages
• The Porn Critic
• The Empty Room
• The Dreaming Jaw The Salivating Ear
• Pending Vegan

Nebula-nominated Novella

Mysterious aliens have landed on Earth, but nobody can figure out what they want. Enter Liz Cobble, a frustrated professor of sapientology who finds herself swept up in a madcap romantic adventure with an eccentric billionaire and an architect who designs flying buildings.

This story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1999, self-published by the authors in 2011, and included in The Collected Kessel (2012).

The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted--cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters--quits working....

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.

What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the "white elephant" role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.

A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology In Dreams (1992), edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois.

From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.

This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.

This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.

Nebula and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991. The story is included in the collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996).

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 5 (1995), edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey and Janna Silverstein. The story is included in the collection How We Got Insipid (2006).

Jonathan Lethem again displays his brilliance in this collection of seven short stories, blurring the boundaries of sci-fi, mystery, and thriller. Tales include 'Light and the Sufferer', in which a crack addict is dogged by an invulnerable alien; 'The Hardened Criminals', wherein convicts are used as building blocks for new prisons; and 'The Happy Man', whose hapless protagonist is raised from the dead to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell. Each tale features Lethem's characteristic deadpan wit and unflinchingly macabre vision of life.

Table of Contents:

• The Happy Man - (1991) - novelette
• Vanilla Dunk - (1992) - novelette
• Light and the Sufferer - (1995) - novelette
• Forever, Said the Duck - (1993) - shortfiction
• Five Fucks - (1996) - novelette
• The Hardened Criminals - (1996) - novelette
• Sleepy People - (1996) - novelette

Later editions also include:

• How We Got In Town and Out Again - (1996) - novelette

This story originally appeared in New Pathways, November 1990. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.

This collection compiles his intensely personal takes on the most interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people.

"David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction" is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. "The Collapsing Frontier" is a brand-new fictional journey into an ominous new unmapped realm. "Calvino's 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History" is an intimate encounter with a literary legend, where Calvino's Italy and Lethem's Brooklyn meet cute. In "My Year of Reading Lemmishly" and "Snowden in the Labyrinth" he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results. A bibliography is also provided as well as our usual Outspoken Interview.