The Fortress of Solitude (Vintage Contemporaries)($10.01Value)

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A New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE.   From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn , comes the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with 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, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.  "A tour de force.... Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell It on the Mountain , A Walker in the City , and Call it Sleep ." -- The New York Times Magazine "One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year.... Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings it to a story worth telling." -- Time “Magnificent. . . . [A] massively ambitious, profoundly accomplished novel.” – San Francisco Chronicle "Glorious, chaotic, raw. . . . One of the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting novels of the year. . . . Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York City, and he brings to it a story worth telling." -- Time "A tour de force . . . Belongs to a venerable New York literary tradition that stretches back through Go Tell it On the Mountain , A Walker in the City , and Call it Sleep ." -- The New York Times “The finest novel of the year, by far, and likely of the past five. . . . Better than a movie, better than a symphony, better than a play, and better than a painting, because it is all of them.” – Austin Chronicle The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's a neighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along with games of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude" is the first great urban coming of age novel to appear in years. JONATHAN LETHEM is the  New York Times  bestselling author of nine novels, including  Dissident Gardens ,  The Fortress of Solitude , and  Motherless Brooklyn ; three short story collections; and two essay collections, including  The Ecstasy of Influence , which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem's work has appeared in  The New Yorker ,  Harper's Magazine ,  Rolling Stone ,  Esquire ,  and The New York Times , among other publications. FROM CHAPTER 7 ...It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song , was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere. At the very least the song was the soundtrack to your destruction, the theme . Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what—a tuba ? French horn? Rhythm guitar and trumpet, pitched to mockery. The singer might as well have held a gun to your head. How it could have been allowed to happen, how it could have been allowed on the radio ? That song ought to be illegal. It wasn’t racist—you’ll never sort that one out, don’t even start—so much as anti-you. Yes they were dancing, and singing, and movin’ to the groovin’, and just when it hit me, somebody turned around and shouted— Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head, that song. Forget what happens when you start haunting the green-tiled halls of Intermediate School 293. September 7, 1976, the week Dylan Ebdus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” was the top song on the rhythm and blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped Billboard’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, -number--one song in the nation. Sing it through gritted teeth: WHITE BOY! Lay down the boogie and play that funky music ’til you die. When Dylan Ebdus first spotted Arthur Lomb the other boy was feigning pain in the far corner of the schoolyard. At some distance Dylan heard the cries and turned from the entrance of the school to look. Catching sight of Arthur Lomb was like noticing the flight and fall of a bird across a