A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

Overview

A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form

“Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem’s stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay.”—Chicago Tribune

This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major sto­ries published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. A major new story, “The Red Sun School of Thoughts,” never published before, follows a teenage boy coming to terms with figures of authority and power—those in both his biological family and in the family he creates for himself.

Elsewhere we meet “Super Goat Man,” a down-at-heels bohemian superhero; “The Porn Critic,” whose accidental expertise wrecks his own romantic aspira­tions; and “Sleepy People,” who pose interpersonal conundrums without ever rousing from their slumber. Fluidly moving between realism and the surreal, the absurd and the mundane, A Different Kind of Tension is a container bursting with life and death, couples in trouble, talking animals, and technologies on the fritz. Through it all are people longing to be seen and to connect; to thrive, love, and be forgiven. “This is the joy of reading Jonathan Lethem: you never know what you’re going to get” (Financial Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063388840
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.15(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Brooklyn Crime Novel, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His five story collections include Men and Cartoons and Lucky Alan, and his short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the Paris Review, among other publications, garnering a Pushcart Prize, a World Fantasy Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Los Angeles and Maine.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Left Bennington College after two years

Editorial Reviews

A late-midcareer retrospective, 30 stories spanning 35 years of work by a talented and celebrated writer. . . . As always, Lethem is broadly curious, genre-promiscuous, and genuinely unpredictable; he ranges, so his stories do, too. . . . Inventive, unpredictable fun.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Lethem’s short stories are surrealisms. Comparisons to the other great surrealists of short fiction would be apt, but he’s created his own mode, and naming his influences maybe obscures his particular achievement. They start as ideas, as in 1950s science fiction or European folk tales, ideas that are clear, startling, bold, strange, memorable. Then they unfold into character sketches as in the realist tradition, full of heart and soul, pain and hilarity. This fusion of real and surreal is what makes these stories so Lethemesque, and so very good. Take one at a time, like strong medicine, or rare gifts.” — Kim Stanley Robinson

“I’m smitten with this collection, which feels as essential as The Fortress of Solitude or Motherless Brooklyn. Thirty-five years of asynchronous pleasure! Here is Lethem at his mind-melting best—as counter-clock-world builder, merry dystopian, king of sentences.”  — Ed Park

“How fortunate to have new and collected stories, because while amazing individually, cumulatively the effect is stunning. That last story: Oh! Lethem creates characters who finger the worry beads in their pockets unseen, conjuring those same hard realities into stepping stones to move the story forward. I read the stories as journeys with significant digressions. You can imagine the writer pointing his magic wand in many directions, but the stories’ sense of weird inevitability can’t be anticipated; up pop our cultural dreams or nightmares, our off-kilter relationships, our personal sadnesses. Nobody does it better.” — Ann Beattie

From the Publisher