
“The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel, but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read. Full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant, genre-defying work will certainly leave a mark.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
“The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel, but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read. Full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant, genre-defying work will certainly leave a mark.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
ARRIVING OCT 3, 2023
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“[An] intricately excavated, breathtaking tale of imperiled childhood in a fitfully gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . With Brooklyn as a microcosm of human folly and strife, Lethem’s virtuoso, many-faceted novel is trenchant, hilarious, wrenching, and tender.”
—BOOKLIST (starred)
‘If Dean Street could talk, Brooklyn Crime Novel would be its voice, and it would serve up a half-century of Brooklyn’s dirt—fractured multicultural dreams, waves of gentrification, ‘black mayonnaise’—while confessing its many crimes, from shoplifted magazines to blockbusting to murder. An intricate, spellbinding tour of the soul of Brooklyn as it casts off Manhattan’s shadow.’
—JAMES HANNAHAM
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime ‘time’? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.”
—COLUM MCCANN
“Brooklyn Crime Novel isn’t what it says it is. In fact, it takes apart the three words of its title, even as it takes each of them very seriously. It loosens the knot that is Brooklyn, city of tangled streets, lost oases, and false fronts. It interrogates what a Crime is—a dance? an exchange? a deal gone wrong? a funny mugging? And it opens up what a Novel can be. This is no soul-affirming flight; no apotheosis of ‘where I’m from’; no prettified, gentrified tale of trauma; nor is it a winky metafictional gambit; nor a self-important autofictional one. Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy, and as with the oldest crime story ever written, Oedipus Rex, the judge, detective, victim, and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time.”
—NAMWALI SERPELL
“Tracking the slippery, overlapping paths of gentrification and crime are a vast cast of characters for whom time and space bend and retract in this expansive novel.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Jonathan Lethem creates a vivid portrait of the borough of Brooklyn over 50 years of profound social and economic change. . . . Anyone attuned by personal experience to the vibrancy and edginess of New York City life, or who simply enjoys reading about it, will find something to savor here.”
—SHELF AWARENESS
“The latest novel from the bard of Brooklyn is a metafictional collage that tells the story of some fifty years in one neighborhood…It’s funny and wise and weird…[a] love letter to Brooklyn.”
—LITHUB
“A wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery…Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form.”
—CRIMEREADS
BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL BOOK TOUR
LOS ANGELES
Monday, October 2, 2023 – 7:00pm
Skylight Book
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
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BALTIMORE
Wednesday, October 4, 2023 · 7:00pm
Enoch Pratt Free Library
400 Cathedral Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
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WASHINGTON DC
Thursday, October 5, 2023 – 7:00pm
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
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NEW YORKER FESTIVAL
Saturday Oct 7, 2023 – 12:30pm
With Colson Whitehead
SVA Theatre,
333 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
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ANDES NY
Joint reading & discussion with Sean Howe
Diamond Hollow Books
72 Main St.
Andes, NY 13731
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BROOKLYN NY
Wednesday, October 11, 2023 · 7 – 8pm
With Jelani Cobb
St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church
157 Montague Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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ALBANY NY
Thursday, October 12, 2023 – Craft Talk 4:30/Reading QA 7:30
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany NY 12222
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LAWRENCE, KS
Raven Book Store
809 Massachusetts
Lawrence, KS 66044
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IOWA CITY
Sunday, October 15, 2023 – 2:00
Prairie Lights Books
15 S. Dubuque St.
Iowa City, IA 52240
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SAN FRANCISCO
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 · 7:15pm
City Lights Books
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133
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