Preorder: Critical Hits from Graywolf, Hard Girls from Mulholland

Critical Hits is an anthology, co-edited with Carmen Maria Machado, of literary nonfiction writing about video games. Out in November 2023, order now from Bookshop.

Hard Girls is a thriller, first in a series, about two sisters with a shared traumatic past who reunite to find their mother. Out in February 2024, order now from Bookshop.

More links for Hard Girls: Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Libro.
More links for Critical Hits: Kobo, Amazon, B&N.

Electronic editions of early work now available on Amazon, Kobo, Apple

My first three novels, plus the beleaguered Happyland, are once again available in new electronic editions. In addition, my recent chapbook with Barrelhouse is available for the first time as an ebook, and I’ve reissued my collaboration with Lou Beach, The Great Zombini. Available now on Amazon and Kobo. Here are links to buy them:

The Light of Falling Stars Amazon
The Light of Falling Stars Kobo

The Funnies Amazon
The Funnies Kobo

On the Night Plain Amazon
On the Night Plain Kobo

Happyland Amazon
Happyland Kobo

Mistranslations and Meeting Notes Amazon
Mistranslations and Meeting Notes Kobo

The Great Zombini Amazon
The Great Zombini Kobo

Scroll down to read descriptions of the books.


BOOKS

Links have been provided for Bookshop.org. Please support your local independent bookstore!

SUBDIVISION

Novel, Graywolf Press, 2021. An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse's owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life.

Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels. A lovelorn truck driver . . . a mysterious child . . . a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger.

Buy from Bookshop.

 

LET ME THINK

Stories, Graywolf Press, 2021. Let Me Think is a meticulous selection of short stories by one of the preeminent chroniclers of the American absurd. Through J. Robert Lennon's mordant yet sympathetic eye, the quotidian realities of marriage, family, and work are rendered powerfully strange in this rich and innovative collection.

These stories, most no more than a few pages, are at once experimental and compulsively readable, the work of an expert craftsman who can sketch whole lives in a mere handful of lines, or reveal, over pages, the boundless complexity of a passing thought. Here you'll find a heist gone wrong, a case of mistaken identity, a hostile encounter with a neighborhood eccentric, a glass eye, a talking owl, and a six-fingered hand. Whatever the subject, Lennon disarms the reader with humor before pivoting to pathos, pain, and disappointment--most notably in an extraordinary sequence of darting, painfully funny fictions about a disintegrating marriage that captures the myriad ways intimacy can fail us, and the ways that we can fail it.

Like Lennon's earlier story collection Pieces for the Left Hand, Let Me Think holds a mirror up to our long-held grudges and secret desires, our petty resentments and moments of redeeming grace, and confirms him as a virtuoso of the form.

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BROKEN RIVER

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Novel, Graywolf Press / Serpent’s Tail, 2017. A modest house in upstate New York. One in the morning. Three people—a couple and their child—hurry out the door, but it’s too late for them. As the virtuosic and terrifying opening scene of Broken River unfolds, a spectral presence seems to be watching with cold and mysterious interest. Soon the house lies abandoned, and years later a new family moves in.

Karl, Eleanor, and their daughter, Irina, arrive from New York City in the wake of Karl’s infidelity to start anew. Karl tries to stabilize his flailing art career. Eleanor, a successful commercial novelist, eagerly pivots in a new creative direction. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Irina becomes obsessed with the brutal murders that occurred in the house years earlier. And, secretly, so does her mother. As the ensemble cast grows to include Louis, a hapless salesman in a carpet warehouse who is haunted by his past, and Sam, a young woman newly reunited with her jailbird brother, the seemingly unrelated crime that opened the story becomes ominously relevant.

“Remarkable. . . . Lennon has written a realistic novel, with vivid characters and flashes of humor and an evocative mood, that is also a playful, sophisticated meditation on storytelling itself.” —The New York Times Book Review

Buy from Bookshop.

SEE YOU IN PARADISE

Write here...

Stories, Graywolf Press / Serpent’s Tail, 2014. In these stories, a portal to another universe can be discovered with surprising nonchalance in a suburban backyard, adoption almost reaches the level of blood sport, and old pals return from the dead to steal your girlfriend. Sexual dysfunction, suicide, tragic accidents, and career stagnation all create surprising opportunities for unexpected grace in this depiction of those days (weeks, months, years) we all have when things just don't go quite right.

“Unconventional yet emotionally resonant stories...Much like his contemporaries Kevin Wilson or Wells Tower, Lennon is one of those writers who defies categorization and is as likely to fit comfortably into Weird Tales as he is into Granta.” ―Kirkus Reviews

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FAMILIAR

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Novel, Graywolf Press / Serpent’s Tail, 2012. Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas’s grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her car, her clothes, her body. When she arrives back home, her life is familiar—but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother Sam is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is—something that might be impossible, for Elisa, for anyone.

The New York Times Book Review: "[An] allusive and mysterious novel . . . one of his finest."

The Boston Globe: "An important book...so thrilling that it achieves an almost magical propulsion."

Buy from Bookshop.

CASTLE

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Novel, Graywolf Press, 2009. A man buys a plot of land in upstate New York, only to discover that it contains an abandoned castle, and the secrets of his past. Buy audiobook from Iambik.com!

The New York Times Book Review: "A terrific story, dire and confusing and convincing...it richly deserves to be read."

The Dallas Morning News: "Clever and insightful, [Castle] compels the reader to solve a series of riddles that reveal the emotional rationale underpinning our most despicable behavior."

Buy from Bookshop.

PIECES FOR THE LEFT HAND

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Stories, Granta Books, 2005, and Graywolf Press, 2009. 100 short shorts.

The Guardian: "These are stories about connections - sometimes meaningful, but often mysterious, or conjured out of random coincidence in our efforts to make moral sense of the world...intriguing and graceful."

Buy from Bookshop.

HAPPYLAND

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Novel, 2006. A wealthy woman has secret plans for the small town she has just moved to. An abridged version of this novel was serialized in Harper's Magazine.

Buy the ebook from Amazon.

MAILMAN

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Novel, W. W. Norton and Granta, 2003. A frenetic bildungsroman about a doomed mailman. Read an excerpt in Granta 82.

Review of Contemporary Fiction: "The secret of this extraordinary work is that letters--written words--are our salvation.Mailman is, finally, a radiant mirror of the days of our lives--a triumphant work of art."

Library Journal: "Like Joseph Heller's John Yossarian and Ken Kesey's Randle McMurphy, Alfred Lippincott, Lennon's titular mailman, is destined to become one of the great characters in American literature... This is black comedy at its best."

Buy from Bookshop.

ON THE NIGHT PLAIN

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Novel, Henry Holt and Granta, 2001. After the Second World War, a man leaves his home on a Great Plains sheep ranch. He returns to chaos and despair, and decides to devote himself to setting things right.

The New York Times: "The kind of book that steals slowly into the reader's sympathy...An utterly convincing evocation of hard lives...impressive."

Publisher's Weekly: "A terse and haunting story that speaks of the inescapable bonds of blood, the ineluctable hold of the land and the healing powers of work and solitude."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

THE FUNNIES

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Novel, Riverhead Books and Granta, 1999. A failed installation artist inherits his father's syndicated comic strip, and is forced to come to terms with his dysfunctional family.

Salon: "Lennon entertainingly sends up celebrity culture and the new children-of-celebrity culture, but his most substantial achievement is his three-dimensional portraits of Tim and Pierce...The novel...makes large what the real funnies make small."

The New Yorker: "Psychologically nuanced, richly detailed, and unexpectedly comic."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

THE LIGHT OF FALLING STARS

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Novel, Riverhead Books and Granta, 1997. The lives of five people are changed by a plane crash in a small Montana town. Winner of Barnes & Noble's 1997 Discover Great New Writers Award.

San Francisco Chronicle: "A memorable first novel...Lennon's lushly descriptive style speaks directly and metaphorically at the same time.... A voice with real promise."

Publisher's Weekly: "[An] ambitious, elegiac debut...[Lennon] paints a world tinged with loss, adeptly showing us sentiments left unspoken, relationships forever left dangling, silent moments of grief...lucid and graceful even in his characters' darkest hours."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.


Tiny Crimes (Anthology)

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Tiny Crimes gathers leading and emerging literary voices to tell tales of villainy and intrigue in only a few hundred words. From the most hard-boiled of noirs to the coziest of mysteries, with diminutive double crosses, miniature murders, and crimes both real and imagined, Tiny Crimes rounds up all the usual suspects, and some unusual suspects, too. With illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook and flash fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Amelia Gray, Adam Sternbergh, Yuri Herrera, Julia Elliott, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Charles Yu, Laura van den Berg, and more, Tiny Crimes scours the underbelly of modern life to expose the criminal, the illegal, and the depraved.

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

Gigantic Worlds (Anthology)

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51 science flash fiction stories from 51 authors that will transport you to other worlds. Over 250 pages of robot rebellions, alien pornography, high society cyborgs, orgasmic planets, space-time disruptions, and futures both likely and unlikely. New or previously uncollected work from Jonathan Lethem, Lynne Tillman, Charles Yu, Alissa Nutting, Ted Chiang, and many more. Hardcover with color interior art and a cover by Michael DeForge.

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

Fakes (Anthology)

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W. W. Norton, 2012. In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered forty short fictions: counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the twenty-first century. Features the JRL story "The Authors Speak."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

Significant Objects (Anthology)

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Fantagraphics Books, 2012. Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment. Features the JRL story "Choirboy."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 (Anthology)

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Mariner Books, 2011. The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected by a leading writer in the field, making the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. Features the JRL story "Weber's Head."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

 

What's Your Exit? (Anthology)

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Word Riot Press, 2010. What's Your Exit? A Literary Detour through New Jersey is a collection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and essay inspired by a place that piques the curiosity of all who have set foot in it...and those who haven't. Themes of family, friendship, sex, love, fear, nostalgia and longing populate this anthology, which features forty-nine writers whose visions of the Jersey landscape are as eclectic and beautiful, and as unnerving and mysterious and bold as the place that unites them. Featuers the JRL story "Mark."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

The Empty Page (Anthology)

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Serpent's Tail, 2009. Decapitated hands, marrow-coloured goo, serial killing Dr Zhivago fanatics and double-sided dildos make their mark on The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. Reddy K is chasing up fresh spiral from the big tube...Ulla Shooks is testifying, countering the wicked with the godly, Michael Chambers is enjoying an empty restaurant for what may be the last time, and Sue Carlyle is buying a penis. And that's just the tip of an ugly and decidedly surreal iceberg. Features the JRL story "Death to Our Friends."

Buy from Amazon.

Who Can Save Us Now? (Anthology)

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The Free Press, 2008. Twenty-two of today's most talented writers (and comics fans) unite in Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology featuring brand-new superheroes equipped for the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century -- with a few supervillains thrown in for good measure. With stunning illustrations by artist Chris Burnham. Features the JRL story "The Rememberer."

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

The Flash (Anthology)

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Social Disease, 2007. A collection of really short stories, including one of JRL's, "Mikeworld," from the Pieces For The Left Hand collection. Also featuring Rick Moody, Steve Almond, Steve Aylett.

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

 

So, What Kept You? (Anthology)

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Flambard Press, 2006. Stories inspired by the journals of Chekhov and Carver. Features the JRL story "When I Married, I Became An Old Woman." Also includes David Means, Andrew Crumley, Ali Smith.

Buy from Amazon.


 

Don't Forget to Write (Anthology)

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826 Valencia, 2005. An anthology of short fiction, combined with writing prompts and assignments for teenagers. Features one of JRL's twenty-second stories from McSweeney's.

Buy from Amazon.


 

The Best American Short Stories 2005 (Anthology)

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Houghton Mifflin, 2005. The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind. Features several of JRL's Pieces for the Left Hand.

Buy from Powells. Buy from Amazon.

Prize Stories 2000: The O. Henry Awards (Anthology)

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Anchor, 2000. Established early in the last century as a memorial to O. Henry, throughout its history this annual collection has consistently offered a remarkable sampling of contemporary short stories. Each year stories are chosen from large and small literary magazines and a panel of distinguished writers is enlisted to award the top prizes. The result is a superb collection of twenty inventive, full-bodied stories representing the very best in American and Canadian fiction. Features the JRL story "The Fool's Proxy," which later became the beginning of On the Night Plain.

Buy from Amazon.