LETHEM, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2014.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 311 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Doubleday, 1999.

Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964) grew up in Brooklyn, studied at Bennington College, and spent his twenties in Berkeley, California, writing the science fiction novels that preceded his mainstream breakthrough. His debut, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), blended hard-boiled detective fiction with speculative elements in a way that announced a writer temperamentally committed to genre hybridity; his subsequent novels deepened that commitment until Motherless Brooklyn resolved it into something that satisfied both popular and literary audiences simultaneously. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1999 and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2000 — the only work to win major prizes in both categories — and Lethem's name became, as one reviewer put it, "familiar in mouths as household words."

Lionel Essrog is an orphan raised by Frank Minna, a small-time Brooklyn detective and fixer who serves as something between an employer and a father figure to Lionel and three other boys from the same orphanage. Lionel has Tourette's syndrome: his mind erupts constantly in tics, compulsions, and involuntary verbal detonations — puns, repetitions, non sequiturs, the language equivalent of a hiccup that cannot be suppressed. He describes himself as the Human Freakshow. He is also, in the way that certain kinds of hyperactivity can sharpen perception, the best observer in any room he enters. When Minna is killed, Lionel investigates, and the novel follows his investigation through the competing loyalties and concealed histories of the Brooklyn demimonde.

What Lethem builds around this premise is, as the New York Times described it, "a novel about the mysteries of consciousness" as much as a detective story — an investigation of what it means to have a mind that won't stop, a voice that operates independently of intention, a body that performs its own running commentary on its owner's inner life. Lionel's Tourette's is both the novel's subject and its formal principle: the prose itself tics and riffs and loops back on itself in a way that enacts the condition rather than merely describing it. The Newsweek comparison to Keatonesque physical comedy was precise — there is something of the great silent comedians in Lionel's graceful, involuntary stumbling toward solutions he didn't know he was looking for. Edward Norton, who held the rights for twenty years, directed and starred in the 2019 film adaptation, transposing the story to 1950s New York.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000539