Synopses & Reviews
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human 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 the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.
This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.
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.
This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.
This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as gentrification.
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human 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 the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.
This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.
This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actual
Synopsis
Lethem has done a number of things here, any one of which is impossible for any but the very finest novelists. He has vividly and lovingly and truthfully, through thrilling evocation of its music, its popular culture, its street games, argot, pharmacology, social mores and racial politics, recreated a world, a moment in history that I would have thought lost and irrecoverable. He has created, in young Dylan, a genuine literary hero. He has reinvented and reinvigorated the myths of the superhero, of black-white relations, of New York City itself. But most of all, from my point of view, he captures precisely-as only a great novelist can-how it feels to love the world that is, on a daily basis, kicking your ass.
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys
THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is luminous, stinging with truth and life. A story of two boys, a Brooklyn sto
Synopsis
The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It’s a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude is the first great urban coming of age novel to appear in years.
Synopsis
Their friendship compromised by the belief systems of the racially charged 1970s, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude share a series of misadventures based on their mutual obsession with comic-book heroes. By the author of Motherless Brooklyn. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.
About the Author
JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of five novels, including
Gun, With Occasion Music, and
Girl in Landscape. His most recent,
Motherless Brooklyn, was named Novel of the Year by
Esquire and won The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award. He is also the author of the story collection,
The Wall of the Sky,
the Wall of the Eye and the novella
This Shape We’re In. He edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year’s Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of
Fence Magazine. His writings have appeared in
The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s, and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
From the Hardcover edition.
Table of Contents
Underberg -- Liner Note -- Prisonaires.
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Jonathan Lethem