First published 2000
Jonathan Lethem curates twenty-eight tales that probe what happens when memory crumbles. The collection opens doors to fractured minds and displaced souls. In one story, a man drifts between ancient and contemporary worlds, unable to anchor himself in time. Another follows an insomniac passenger aboard a spacecraft as his grip on sanity weakens. A secretary ventures through menacing city streets in a journey that warps her sense of reality. An aging former hippie lives trapped in the early 1970s, his memory frozen decades in the past. These characters wrestle with vanished time and manufactured recollections. They inhabit the uncertain ground between actual events and what they think occurred. The anthology features masters like Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Haruki Murakami, plus contemporary writers including Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, and Walker Percy. Lethem adds his own contribution to this literary map of forgetting. Each story reveals how memory shapes who we are and questions what remains when that foundation dissolves.
Genres: science-fiction, literary-fiction, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
432 pages · Paperback · Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group