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Motherless Brooklyn
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

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Published:
HarperAudio 2014
Accelerated Reader:
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 15
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM WARNER BROS. STARRING BRUCE WILLIS, EDWARD NORTON, AND WILLEM DAFOE

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head. A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
01/21/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062329219
Accelerated Reader:
UG
Level 6.1, 15 Points
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. (2014). Motherless Brooklyn. Unabridged HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. 2014. Motherless Brooklyn. HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn. HarperAudio, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Jonathan Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Shared Digital Collection64
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Grouped Work ID:
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Oct 24, 2019 13:48:30
Date Updated:
Oct 24, 2019 13:48:30
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 27, 2024 15:20:00
Last Metadata Change:
Mar 27, 2024 15:20:00
Last Availability Check:
Mar 27, 2024 15:20:01
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Mar 27, 2024 15:20:01
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 29, 2024 02:17:20

OverDrive Product Record

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        Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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title
Motherless Brooklyn
fullDescription

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM WARNER BROS. STARRING BRUCE WILLIS, EDWARD NORTON, AND WILLEM DAFOE

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head. A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from August 30, 1999
        Hard-boiled crime fiction has never seen the likes of Lionel Essrog, the barking, grunting, spasmodically twitching hero of Lethem's gonzo detective novel that unfolds amidst the detritus of contemporary Brooklyn. As he did in his convention-smashing last novel, Girl in Landscape, Lethem uses a blueprint from genre fiction as a springboard for something entirely different, a story of betrayal and lost innocence that in both novels centers on an orphan struggling to make sense of an alien world. Raised in a boys home that straddles an off-ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lionel is a misfit among misfits: an intellectually sensitive loner with a bad case of Tourette's syndrome, bristling with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. When the novel opens, Lionel has long since been rescued from the orphanage by a small-time wiseguy, Frank Minna, who hired Lionel and three other maladjusted boys to do odd jobs and to staff a dubious limo service/detective agency on a Brooklyn main drag, creating a ragtag surrogate family for the four outcasts, each fiercely loyal to Minna. When Minna is abducted during a stakeout in uptown Manhattan and turns up stabbed to death in a dumpster, Lionel resolves to find his killer. It's a quest that leads him from a meditation center in Manhattan to a dusty Brooklyn townhouse owned by a couple of aging mobsters who just might be gay, to a zen retreat and sea urchin harvesting operation in Maine run by a nefarious Japanese corporation, and into the clutches of a Polish giant with a fondness for kumquats. In the process, Lionel finds that his compulsions actually make him a better detective, as he obsessively teases out plots within plots and clues within clues. Lethem's title suggests a dense urban panorama, but this novel is more cartoonish and less startlingly original than his last. Lethem's sixth sense for the secret enchantments of language and the psyche nevertheless make this heady adventure well worth the ride. Author tour.

      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Rather than imposing himself on the work, Steve Buscemi, a name familiar to anyone following modern film noir, adds to Lethem's brilliant novel, making it his as well as the author's. This detective tale is told from the point of view of Lionel Essrog, one of four orphans banded together by private detective Frank Minna. When their mentor is murdered, Essrog seeks to solve not only the crime, but also the meaning behind his boss's enigmatic agency. The real novelty in this work lies in the protagonist's Tourette's syndrome, which manifests in ticks, verbal ejaculations, and obsessive attention to details. Rather than making a joke or gimmick out of the neurological condition, the author treats it as a part of Lionel Essrog that is sometimes sad, often funny, and always human. Buscemi's rendering of the verbal ticks is handled subtly and effectively, without overdoing or lampooning the condition. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome. He can't control his tics, jerks, and nonsensical, often offensive, language. Despite this handicap he has been taken under the wing of a small-time hood, whose murder early in the narrative he is determined to solve. By turns funny, poignant, and gritty, this is a tour de force of writing you'll long remember. Frank Muller's narration is nothing short of astounding; to say this would be a challenging piece to perform would be an understatement, and Muller has never been in better form. He gives Lionel's Tourette's persona a distinctly different voice and makes the lightning transitions from voice to voice with never a slip. Somehow he manages to make Lionel not a sentimental sideshow, but a fully human character you like right away. In less capable hands this might have been a disaster, but with the consummate skill of this audio superstar it becomes an achievement unlikely to be equaled--by him or anyone else. D.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        October 2, 2000
        This entertaining play on the hardboiled detective tale features an unlikely gumshoe with Tourette's syndrome, which compels him to count, tap and make strange vocalizations at inopportune moments. Such ticks could seem gimmicky, but Lethem writes it, and Buscemi performs it, with such styles that the compulsions seem an endearing idiosyncrazy (though not to the Tourettic's cohorts, who call him "Freakshow"). Regretfully, it's hard to grasp Lethem's wordplay as it goes whizzing by-Buscemi enunciates at great speed to convey the frenetic activity inside the man's head. Lionel Essrog works with three other young men for Frank Minna's small time detective agency ("Minna men," Lionel calls them) masquerading as car service ("No cars!" the boys respond whenever the phone rings). Lionel was saved from an orphanage by Minna, so when his mentor is killed on the job, Lionel is devastated and determines to solve the crime. The chase takes him from a zendo on Manhattan's Upper East Side to a resort on the Maine coast as he follows a character he can identify only as "the giant." Buscemi convincingly conveys the accents of Japanese Zen masters and Brooklyn mobsters, along with Lionel's verbal acrobatics, all without losing the noirish ambience Lethem is gently riffing. Listeners may find themselves unable to turn off their walkmen and put this one down. Based on the Doubleday hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 16, 1999).

      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: This surely rates as one of the more challenging audiobooks to perform. (The novel was published in 1999.) The story's narrator, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome. Geoffrey Cantor delivers his eruptions of words effectively, seamlessly moving from Lionel's verbal tics to his straightforward storytelling. He does convincing New York accents and delivers the gangster patter with the right tone and style. He reads Lethem's literary take on classic detective fiction with empathy, and his narration is eloquently done. This 2014 production is a roller-coaster ride through 1950s New York City with stops at a Zen center, a Brooklyn brownstone occupied by a pair of mobsters--one even reminds the listener of Brando in THE GODFATHER--and a thrilling chase scene that ends up on the coast of Maine. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM WARNER BROS. STARRING BRUCE WILLIS, EDWARD NORTON, AND WILLEM DAFOE

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head. A compulsively involving a and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

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