The Blot

A return to form, absurd and digressive in a way that makes clear Lethem’s debt to Thomas Pynchon

Alex Preston, Observer, 2017 Books of the Year

Lethem can turn a sentence like few others

Daniel Swift, The Spectator

The Blot does not disappoint. It sets a high bar for 2017’s fiction… There are moments of genuine, inexplicable tenderness as well as the sarcasm, venality and schadenfreude that swirl around the book… It also shows… that the genre best equipped to speak truthfully about the world we are in is not a flat-footed and sententious realism, but un-realism.

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

Lethem’s phrasemaking is as vivid and funny as ever

Daily Telegraph

Lethem is a renowned stylist who turns out funny, exuberant, surprising sentences, and who has a deep love of genre fiction

Paul Laity, Guardian

The encounter Lethem depicts in the German’s ostentatiously costly study […] is one of the finest standalone scenes I’ve read in some time… there is much to admire here: the author’s ability to bend genre; the depth of his knowledge of his chosen subjects (backgammon; brain surgery) and the breadth of his pop culture references… Few writers can compete with Lethem for fluency and panache.

Sarah Crown, Guardian

Lethem's 10th novel is a romp in which history, both personal and collective, can't help but assert itself... Think Thomas Pynchon, especially in the scenes set in Berkeley, a landscape of hipster burger shops and lost souls still longing for a revolution that washed out in an undertow of drugs and dissolution decades before. [A] fitting follow-up to Dissident Gardens (2013)... Lethem takes real pleasure in the language and writes with a sense of the absurd that illuminates his situations and his characters... In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.

Kirkus, *Starred Review*

A humorously surreal and articulate story of Bruno's search for himself after having his face and brain rearranged, both by surgery and by modern life in general, this is, among other things, a great Berkeley novel like Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue.

Library Journal, *Starred Review*

There are probably a dozen novelists whose new books, every one, I’m predisposed to read. Jonathan Lethem is one of them. I like his fundamental literary ratios — plot-to-pensées, comedy-to-tragedy — and the prose is a pleasure, lucid sentences that swerve and surprise without being show-offy

Kurt Andersen, New York Times Book Review

Jonathan Lethem’s new novel combines a little of the intrigue of James Bond with all the sexiness of backgammon. The result is a literary game that’s shaken not stirred.

Ron Charles, Washington Post

This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a "Twilight Zone" episode filmed by the Coen brothers … Lethem has intense gifts; nothing he writes is a waste of time.

Dwight Garner, New York Times