About this item
Highlights
- A funny, inventive, and wholly original post-apocalyptic novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn and The ArrestMeet Chaos, a young man who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth.
- Author(s): Jonathan Lethem
- 256 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Science Fiction
Description
About the Book
The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming, is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in a projection booth therem trying to blot out his present, unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant, Kellog, reveals to him over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth is a little more complicated. . . .Book Synopsis
A funny, inventive, and wholly original post-apocalyptic novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest
Meet Chaos, a young man who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking alcohol, and eating food out of cans.
It's an unusual and at times unbearable existence, but Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may have no connection to the truth. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find answers. As the pair travels through the United States they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none of the people they meet can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.
From the Back Cover
"An author to be reckoned with . . . both original and persuasive." --NewsweekIn Amnesia Moon, we meet a young man named Chaos, who's living in a movie theater in post-apocalyptic Wyoming, drinking heavily and eating food out of cans.
Chaos soon discovers that his post-nuclear reality may be a false one. So he takes to the road with a girl named Melinda in order to find the answers. As they travel through America they find that while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, no one can fill in their incomplete memories. Gradually, figures from Chaos's past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, make Chaos remember some of his forgotten life as a man named Moon.
"Where Jack Kerouac and Philip K. Dick will meet Mel Gibson's Road Warrior and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert after the bombs have fallen on America . . . Almost everybody is bereft . . . they wait for Godot and gestalt. If Amnesia Moon is Pynchon Lite, like Pynchon's Vineland, it is also the Philip K. Dickiest of Lethem's novels."--John Leonard, The New York Review of Books
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; the national bestseller The Fortress of Solitude; and Gun, with Occasional Music. He lives in Brooklyn.
Review Quotes
"A hip, updated conflation of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog and Jim Thompson's The Alcoholics. Jonathan Lethem escorts us down an impossibly post-terminal Route 66, kicking and screaming and loving every minute of it." -- Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart
"An author to be reckoned with . . . A social critic, a sardonic satirist like the Walker Percy of Love in the Ruins. But with Amnesia Moon, Lethem slips out of the shadow of his predecessors to deliver a droll, downbeat vision that is both original and persuasive." -- Newsweek