Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude

In honor of the 25th anniversary of Motherless Brooklyn—a hardcover omnibus edition of two of the most acclaimed novels by one of America’s most inventive novelists

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn’s self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourette’s symptoms drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel’s world is suddenly turned topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 

The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unraveling of the boys’ friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. 

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.