The Funnies

Castle by J. Robert Lennon is a mesmerizing novel about memory, guilt, power, and violence.

In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.” So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the owner is blacked out.

Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest — lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer — that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America’s current military misadventures — and Loesch’s secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what — and who — might lie at the heart of Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, “contains enough electricity to light up the country.””

The first substantial collection of short fiction from “a writer with enough electricity to light up the country” (Ann Patchett)

“I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal,” observes one narrator in this collection of effervescent and often uncanny stories. Drawing on fifteen years of work, is the fullest expression yet of J. Robert Lennon’s distinctive and brilliantly comic take on the pathos and surreality at the heart of American life.

In Lennon’s America, a portal to another universe can be discovered with surprising nonchalance in a suburban backyard, adoption almost reaches the level of blood sport, and old pals return from the dead to steal your girlfriend. Sexual dysfunction, suicide, tragic accidents, and career stagnation all create surprising opportunities for unexpected grace in this full-hearted and mischievous depiction of those days (weeks, months, years) we all have when things just don’t go quite right.

Finally available in the United States, a singular story collection that declared “unsettlingly brilliant”.

Astudent’s suicide note is not what it seems. A high school football rivalry turns absurd — and deadly. A much-loved cat seems to have been a different animal all along. A pair of identical twins aren’t identical at all — or even related. A man finds his own yellowed birth announcement inside a bureau bought at auction. Set in a small upstate New York town, told in a conversational style, is a stream of a hundred anecdotes, none much longer than a page. At once funny, bizarre, familiar, and disturbing, these deceptively straightforward tales nevertheless shock and amaze through uncanny coincidence, tragic misunderstanding, strange occurrence, or sudden insight. Unposted letters, unexpected visitors, false memories — in J. Robert Lennon’s vision of America, these are the things that decide our fate. Wry and deadpan, powerful and philosophical, these addictive little tales reveal the everyday world as a strange and eerie place.

A haunting, enigmatic novel about a woman who is given a second chance — and isn’t sure whether she really wants it.

Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas’s grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her body is more voluptuous; she’s wearing different clothes and driving a new car. When she arrives home, her life is familiar — but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is — something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone. In J. Robert Lennon continues his profound and exhilarating exploration of the surreal undercurrents of contemporary American life.