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- Edition:
- Unabridged (Random House Audio)
- Length:
- 18 hours, 33 minutes
- File Size:
- 510 MB (15 files)
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Summary
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.
This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist.
This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.
This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.
This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.
Quotes from the Critics
"[A] big, personal, sometimes breathtaking, and sometimes disappointing book....The opening section, Dylan's childhood, is some kind of miracle....[A] fine, rich, thoughtful novel from one of our best writers." - Kirkus
"To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He's defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned...." - Salon
"It is a testament to [Lethem's] sheer verve as a writer and the acuity of his social and psychological observations that the novel as a whole manages to override [some] awkward interludes in which the hero and his best friend (as both children and adults) play at being superheroes, using a special ring to invoke magical powers of invisibility. Happily, the bulk of [the novel] avoids such cutesy pyrotechnics to focus on the story of Dylan Ebdus's coming of age....[I]t demonstrates that Mr. Lethem does not need the tricked-up narrative strategies of his earlier books to hold the reader's attention. More important, it attests to a new virtuosity on his part: an ability to conjure disparate worlds from Brooklyn to Berkeley to Hollywood with uncommon energy and skill, as well as an ability to map the bumpy terrain of childhood and adolescence with humor and compassion and seemingly total recall for the enthusiasms and humiliations of those years." - New York Times
Also Written By
Jonathan Lethem
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