Publié à l'aube du vingt et unième siècle, Mailman, road movie existentiel et méchamment drôle, marque la naissance d'une nouvelle révélation de la littérature américaine. Avec ce roman tendu comme un arc, J. Robert Lennon nous entraîne de New York à la Floride en passant par le Kazakhstan dans l'univers d'Albert Lippincott, dit Mailman. Facteur dévoué et maniaque d'une petite ville américaine, Mailman a ses petits secrets: l'habitude compulsive de photocopier et de lire le courrier des autres, une inquiétante dépression nerveuse et la relation tordue qu'il entretient avec sa sur. Aussi, lorsque l'un de ses usagers se suicide à cause d'une lettre retenue trop longtemps ? , les événements se précipitent pour Llippincott, qui va devoir faire face une fois pour toutes aux nombreuses fêlures de sa vie. Si Mailman est bien une comédie noire, c'est aussi l'ambitieuse tentative de dépeindre la destinée d'un homme à la recherche de la paix dans un pays «pétri de violence et de tristesse partagée». C'est comique et tragique à la fois. C'est dérangeant, c'est touchant. C'est la chronique survoltée d'un combat perdu d'avance. **Biographie de l'auteur Né en 1970, J. Robert Lennon suit une licence à l'Université de Pennsylvanie, qu'il termine avec succès en 1992 avant de continuer ses études à l'Université de Montana, où il obtient un Master en 1995. Deux ans plus tard, il publie son premier roman The Light of Falling Stars pour lequel il reçoit le prix Barnes and Noble du meilleur nouvel écrivain. Il publie six autres romans : The Funnies (1999), On the Night Plain (2001), Mailman (2004), Happyland (2006), Castle (2009) et Familiar (2012). Les droits de ses deuxième et quatrième romans ont été achetés pour être adaptés au grand écran. Lennon est également reconnu pour ses nouvelles. Il publie en 2005 Pieces for the Left Hand, recueil nominé au Story Award en 2010, et certaines de ses nouvelles sont publiées dans de prestigieux recueils : Prize Stories, 2000 : the O. Henry Award, Best American Short Stories 2005, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Preuve de son succès, la série télévisée Unforgettable (avec Poppy Montgomery et Dylan Walsh) est inspirée de sa nouvelle « The Rememberer ». Il s'illustre aussi dans la poésie et donne de nombreuses conférences dans des universités américaines et dans le cadre d'évènements littéraires. Comptant plusieurs cordes à son arc, Lennon, sous le nom d'Inverse Room, s'essaye à la musique. Il sort trois albums : Simulacrum en 2002, Pieces for the Left Hand, complément de son recueil de nouvelles éponyme, en 2005, et American Recluse en 2007. En plus de sa carrière artistique, il enseigne l'écriture créative depuis 2005 à l'Université de Cornell à Ithaca, où il vit avec sa femme et ses enfants. J. Robert Lennon travaille actuellement sur un recueil de nouvelles, The Accursed Items and Other Stories, dont la publication est prévue pour 2014. Mailman sera porté à l'écran par Sam Mendes. 

A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting traumaAn 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...

In this "racing, twisty crime novel," two estranged twin sisters hunt down their elusive mother—and face down the darkness they tried to escape. (Chelsea Bieker) Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s...

Happy Masters is a megalomaniacal entrepreneur, a shrewd negotiator, and procurer of other people's lives. And she is also the mastermind behind Happy Girls, the phenomenally successful doll company. With a tenacious grasp on her life's goals, Happy Masters sets out to make her dream town from scratch. As she sets her sights on Equinox, New York, Happy and her henchmen transform it into an amusement park of sorts—Happyland. What follows is anything but.Happyland is an entertainingly sinister novel, which dares to question the ideals of small-town America and what happens when fulfilling your dreams becomes a nightmare.

The Light of Falling Stars is about the crash of an airplane and its aftermath—how do we find those that we love, both before and after death?

A haunting, enigmatic novel about a woman who is given a second chance—and isn't sure whether she really wants it * A Publishers Weekly "Indie Sleeper" * A Powell's Indiespensable Pick * The Nervous Breakdown's October Book Club Pick *Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas's grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her body is more voluptuous; she's wearing different clothes and driving a new car. When she arrives 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 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...

The most inventive and entertaining novel to date from "a master of the dark arts" (Kelly Link)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...

The first substantial collection of short fiction from "a writer with enough electricity to light up the country" (Ann Patchett)"I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal," observes one narrator in this collection of effervescent and often uncanny stories. Drawing on fifteen years of work, See You in Paradise is the fullest expression yet of J. Robert Lennon's distinctive and brilliantly comic take on the pathos and surreality at the heart of American life. In Lennon's America, 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 full-hearted and mischievous depiction of those days (weeks, months, years) we all have when things just don't go...