Men and Cartoons

CRITIQUE: Trials and Appraisals Often, novelists use the short story form to experiment with style. Here, while there is an element of stylistic innovation, Jonathan Lethem uses the form to test characters, concepts, settings and plots. Loosely speaking, the "men" of the title are the characters (some......more

This is a very literate collection of nine short stories. In this instance, I define literate as meaning that the author doesn't come out and tell you what he wants to say, but rather talks around it and makes you guess, and if you come up with something good then you get a feeling of profound accom......more

An inferior collection to The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (with one story repeated from that book), feat.ing mainly flippant semi-comic stories like ‘Super Goat Man’ about a retired superhero or ‘The Glasses’ about a mysterious scratch on an angry black man’s lens. The best stories here are......more

A collection that moves comfortably between different genres, often slipping in the crevices between them. Some stories are inevitably more satisfying than others; the one about that spray can and the one about the goatman are pretty unforgettable. Because of their insistence on specific themes or i......more

Middling collection of magazine stories, collected into one volume. Some familiar Lethem themes, superheroes, baseball, relationships. Depending on your personal proclivity you may enjoy some stories more than others but that's to be expected in this type of collection. They all had their moments bu......more