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A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 6 reviews on
A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form
"Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem's stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay." --Chicago Tribune
This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. A major new story, "The Red Sun School of Thoughts," never published before, follows a teenage boy coming to terms with figures of authority and power--those in both his biological family and in the family he creates for himself.
Elsewhere we meet "Super Goat Man," a down-at-heels bohemian superhero; "The Porn Critic," whose accidental expertise wrecks his own romantic aspirations; and "Sleepy People," who pose interpersonal conundrums without ever rousing from their slumber. Fluidly moving between realism and the surreal, the absurd and the mundane, A Different Kind of Tension is a container bursting with life and death, couples in trouble, talking animals, and technologies on the fritz. Through it all are people longing to be seen and to connect; to thrive, love, and be forgiven. "This is the joy of reading Jonathan Lethem: you never know what you're going to get." (Financial Times)
Book Details
- Publisher: Ecco Press
- Publish Date: Sep 23rd, 2025
- Pages: 400
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.23in - 6.38in - 1.19in - 1.11lb
- EAN: 9780063388840
- Categories: • Short Stories (single author)• Literary• Science Fiction - Collections & Anthologies
About the Author
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Brooklyn Crime Novel, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His five story collections include Men and Cartoons and Lucky Alan, and his short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Paris Review, among other publications, garnering a Pushcart Prize, a World Fantasy Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Los Angeles and Maine.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"I'm smitten with this collection, which feels as essential as The Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn. Thirty-five years of asynchronous pleasure! Here is Lethem at his mind-melting best--as counter-clock-world builder, merry dystopian, king of sentences." - Ed Park
"A late-midcareer retrospective, 30 stories spanning 35 years of work by a talented and celebrated writer. . . . As always, Lethem is broadly curious, genre-promiscuous, and genuinely unpredictable; he ranges, so his stories do, too. . . . Inventive, unpredictable fun." - Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"How fortunate to have new and collected stories, because while amazing individually, cumulatively the effect is stunning. That last story: Oh! Lethem creates characters who finger the worry beads in their pockets unseen, conjuring those same hard realities into stepping stones to move the story forward. I read the stories as journeys with significant digressions. You can imagine the writer pointing his magic wand in many directions, but the stories' sense of weird inevitability can't be anticipated; up pop our cultural dreams or nightmares, our off-kilter relationships, our personal sadnesses. Nobody does it better." - Ann Beattie
"This collection of 35 years' worth of short fiction is Lethem's career in miniature, highlighting the various ways [he] has played with form: Philip K. Dick-inspired science fiction, postmodern takes on pulpy crime stories, genre parodies (one story spoofs Hollywood pitch meetings) and domestic stories that turn the typical he-said-she-said material on its head. A must-read for both longtime fans and newcomers to Lethem's expansive, off-kilter sensibility." - Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times
"In Jonathan Lethem's genre fiction, the conventions of the detective story or the crime thriller are always secondary to his characters' emotions and idiosyncrasies. In his short stories, the absurd personalities have free reign. This career-spanning survey begins with work published in the 1980s and ends with a story Lethem wrote last year, 'The Red Sun School of Thoughts.' The book is worth it for this alone." - Bustle
"Lethem has long been among the most distinctive voices in American letters. His unique blend of neo-noir, techno-futurist dystopia, and sociopolitical satire is well represented in this essential collection. . . . Lethem skillfully probes themes of identity, memory, and alienation with philosophical depth, often with an element of irreverent humor. Lethem's prodigious imagination and clever wordplay permeate each story, building both reality-adjacent and surrealist worlds with a playful wink." - Booklist
"A revelatory career-spanning collection of 30 fantastical and speculative stories. . . . 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." - Publishers Weekly
"Opening with two stories from 1990, [A Different Kind of Tension] showcases 30 pieces spanning 35 years. . . . The effect is of a kind of fun-house mirror, a set of reversals and inversions, in which the author's fascinations--his motifs, as it were--double back on one another: talking animals . . . superpowers; elements of genre; and always, always, that restless imagination, in which the most common situations come fraught with mystery, the delirious sense that anything might happen at any time." - Alta Journal
"Comprehensive and compelling, a career retrospective befitting one of our most perceptive and agile contemporary writers. It's 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, decades hence, if there turn out to be parallel realities more fortuitous than our own." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Lethem's] new collection draws from his ambitious practice of the form over nearly four decades. . . . A good Lethem story exhausts the juiciest permutations of a scenario while managing not to outstay its welcome. . . . An excellent collection." - New York Times Book Review
"The ever-innovative Jonathan Lethem's latest offering, A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories, spans three decades of writing, including such genre-busting work as 'Super Goat Man, ' about a struggling bohemian superhero, and 'The Porn Critic, ' in which the title character's day (and night) job conflicts with his romantic life. Also in the collection is a brand-new Bay Area-set story, 'The Red Sun School of Thoughts.' Throughout, Lethem irreverently dissects the tensions and joys of modern life." - Alta
"The breadth of [Lethem's] output is the kind of thing more writers should aspire to: science-fiction, mystery, crime, literary fiction, humor, tragedy. Nothing less than the full breadth of human experience, you might say--and so I'm particularly excited for his having reached the level of literary fame that allows for a 'new and selected' collection: an opportunity to meet Lethem in his fullest expression, whether for the first time or the fiftieth." - LitHub
"A genre-bending, speculative and imaginative group of stories that frequently deal with somewhat absurd premises that seem less-and-less distant from reality with each passing year. These stories could be called Pynchonian, Borgesian or even Orwellian in a way, but most of all, they are fully Lethemian. Nobody writes quite like Jonathan Lethem, and each one of these stories is an absolute treat to experience. . . . [A] wonderful, wacky, immaculately human collection of stories." - The Clarion-Ledger