"The year's best novel." --The New Republic

"Emotionally complex, stylistically sophisticated. . . . As a story about a quarrelsome family entangled with impossible ideals, it's touchingly universal." --The Washington Post

"A typically Lethem-esque cast of zanies, communalists, sexual adventurers, innocents, druggies, dreamers, and do-gooders . . . whose lives collide and clash with gut-busting humor, heart, and hubris." --Elle

"As ambitious as Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth and as stinging as Bob Dylan . . . Dissident Gardens shows Lethem in full possession of his powers as a novelist, as he smoothly segues between historical periods and internal worlds . . . Erudite, beautifully written, wise, compassionate, heartbreaking and pretty much devoid of nostalgia." --Los Angeles Times

"Dissident Gardens seamlessly weaves together three generations, yet it doesn't broadcast itself as a multigenerational epic, nor is it afflicted by the desire to pose as the next great American novel. It's an intimate book." --The New York Times Book Review

"A tour de force, a brilliant, satiric journey through America's dissident history."--The Star Tribune

"Lethem has artfully blended, redefined, ignored, satirized and enriched the traditional categories of fiction." --The Plain Dealer

"Remarkable. . . . Lethem's best novel since Motherless Brooklyn. . . . Crackle[s] with wordplay and intelligence." --The Miami Herald

"The writing soars. . . . Lethem can riff with the best, spinning knockout lines that make you stop and stare . . . while you admire a sentence's every turn." --The Seattle Times

"An assured, expert literary performance by one of our most important writers. . . . Magnificent." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Brilliantly caustic and deeply moving. . . . Rather than a history book writ small, we realize, this is a powerful family portrait writ large." --Haaretz (Israel)

"A brilliant, funny, compendious novel at whose heart lies a sharp, slim blade of thought and style. It is the quality of [Lethem's] perception, his empathy, that makes this material new: that sharpness is the sharpness of a mind at work, re-radicalizing a radical era with notions both literary and political that are outside itself." --The Guardian (London)

"A righteous, stupendously involving novel about the personal toll of failed political movements and the perplexing obstacles to doing good. . . . Lethem is breathtaking in this torrent of potent voices, searing ironies, pop-culture allusions, and tragicomic complexities." --Booklist (starred review)

"The cast is a heady, swirly mix of fascinating, lonely people. Lethem's writing, as always, packs a witty punch. . . . As illuminating of 20th-century American history as it is of the human burden of overcoming alienation." --Publishers Weekly