Meg Wolitzer

Jonathan Lethem

Dave Eggers

William Finnegan

Neil Gaiman

Anthony Doerr

Salman Rushdie

Lauren Groff

Marlon James

Andrew Sean Greer

Ann Patchett

Brit Bennett

Yaa Gyasi

Sergio De La Pava

Aleksandar Hemon

George Saunders

Rabih Alameddine

Jesmyn Ward

Michael Cunningham

Jennifer Egan

Louise Erdrich

Morgan Parker

Jacqueline Woodson

Steven Okazaki

Geraldine Brooks

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Scott Turow

Timothy Egan

Victor Lavalle

Moses Sumney

Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Hector Tobar

Li Yiyun

Elizabeth Strout

C.J. Anders

Brenda J. Childs

David Handler

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Fight of the Century

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car. The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted--cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters--quits working. . . . Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him. Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

A Novel

The Arrest

Lionel Essrog has always respected Frank Minna, who helped him out when he was young, and when Frank is found dead, Lionel and his friends, the Minna Men, scour the streets of Brooklyn in search of the killer.

Motherless Brooklyn

In a bizarre, noirish world shared by people and intelligent animals, Conrad Metcalf, a human private detective, finds one of his cases has drawn him into a conflict between gangsters and the Inquisitor's office. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Gun, with Occasional Music

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face. Handsome, impeccably tuxedoed Bruno Alexander travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur "whales" who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon. Fronted by his pasty, vampiric manager, Edgar Falk, Bruno arrives in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore. Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board sideways. Things don't go much better in Berlin. Bruno's flirtation with Madchen, the striking blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game at the unsettling Herr Kohler's mansion goes awry as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing diagnosis. Having run through Falk's money, Bruno turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental surgery that might save his life. Berkeley, where Bruno discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed never to return. Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira's come-ons and Keith's machinations, Bruno confronts two existential questions: Is the gambler being played by life? And what if you're telepathic but it doesn't do you any good?

A Gambler's Anatomy

Deeply in love with physicist Alice Coombs, professor Philip Engstrand becomes involved in Alice's research into the creation of "Lack," a conscious void in the universe that swallows up things it fancies

As She Climbed Across the Table

Philip K. Dick

Pamela Jackson

Based on thousands of personal notes, letters and other written sources, a definitive presentation of the late science-fiction and metaphysical author's unpublished masterwork offers insight into his life-long exploration of the nature of reality and perception and the relationship between humanity and the divine.

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

Expanded with two additional stories, a new anthology of short fiction by the critically acclaimed author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn journeys to colorful, frequently offbeat worlds in such tales as "The Vision," "The Spray," "Vivian Relf," "Super Goat Man," and "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door." Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Stories

Men and Cartoons

A career-spanning anthology of fiction, memoir and commentary incorporates several new essays and includes numerous celebrity portraits as well as the author's musings on topics ranging from sex in cinema and drugs to cyberculture and graffiti.

Nonfictions, Etc

The Ecstasy of Influence

Longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize Longlisted for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award In 1955, Rose Zimmer got screwed. It wasnâe(tm)t the first time, and it wasnâe(tm)t the last. In fact, Rose âe" like all American Communists âe" got screwed by the entire twentieth century. She doesnâe(tm)t take it lying down. For over forty years she pounds the streets of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, terrorising the neighbourhood, and her family, with the implacability of her beliefs, the sheer force of her grudge. And the generations that follow Rose will not easily escape her influence, her ire, her radicalism. Foremost among these is Miriam, Rose's charismatic and passionate want-away hippie daughter, who heads for the Greenwich Village of the Sixties; her black stepson Cicero, an angry debunking machine; and her bewildered grandson Sergius, who finds himself an orphan in the capitalist now. A radical family epic, and an alternative view of the American twentieth century, Dissident Gardens is the story of a group of individuals who fought and lost, but might one day win. It is a blast of pure style and literary dazzle from one of the great and most innovative writers of the age.

Dissident Gardens

Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn “One of America’s greatest storytellers.” —Washington Post Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe’s trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . . Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

The Feral Detective

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN IS RELEASED IN CINEMAS NOVEMBER 2019 Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. the Human Freakshow, is a victim of Tourette's syndrome (an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense, touch every surface in reach, rearrange objects). Local tough guy Frank Minna hires the adolescent Lionel and three other orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys and grooms them to become the Minna Men, a fly-by-night detective-agency-cum-limoservice. Then one terrible day Frank is murdered, and Lionel must become a real detective. With crackling dialogue, a dazzling evocation of place, and a plot which mimics Tourette's itself in its freshness and capacity to shock, Motherless Brooklyn is a bravura performance: funny, tense, touching, and extravagant.

Blending elements of reminiscence and cultural commentary, the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn presents a series of imaginative essays that address a wide range of cultural obsessions, in such works as "Defending The Searchers," "Identifying with Your Parents," and "13/1977/21," about the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

And Other Essays

The Disappointment Artist

A collection of bestselling, NBCC prize-winning author Jonathan Lethem's finest writing on the subject of writers and writing, from Melville's "Moby-Dick" to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"

On Books and Writers

More Alive and Less Lonely

Brooklyn Crime Novel

You don't love me yet

An employee at The Complaint Line who spends hours listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances, Lucinda Hoekke falls madly in love with one of her frequent callers, but her romance has unexpected complications for Lucinda and her fellow members of an alternative rock band in which she plays bass. 100,000 first printing.

You Don't Love Me Yet

Nine short tales by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist vacillate between reality and surrealism and include the stories "Pending Vegan," "The King of Sentences" and "The Porn Critic."

And Other Stories

Lucky Alan

Malcolm Braly

A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism in which Malcolm Braly paints an unforgettable picture of the complex and frightening world of the penitentiary. At its center are the violently intertwined stories of Chilly Willy, in trouble with the law from his earliest years and now the head of the prison's flourishing black market in drugs and sex, and of Paul, wracked with guilt for the murder of his wife and desperate for some kind of redemption. At once brutal and tender, clear-eyed and rueful, On the Yard presents the penitentiary not as an exotic location, an exception to everyday reality, but as an ordinary place, one every reader will recognize, American to the core.

On the Yard

Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive former child-star, living a vague routine of dinner parties and glamorous engagements on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Meanwhile, his astronaut fiancée, trapped on the International Space Station, sends him rapturous love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift. Into Chase's life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers and a desperate ache for meaning. Together, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth - that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought. At once beautiful and tawdry, poignant and funny, Lethem's new novel is as always, utterly unique.

Jonathan Lethem

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