The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss [Paperback]

Amnesia is an illusive subject that many artists have pursued, particularly literary artists. And like most things hard to get, its suitors are legion. Haruki Murakami's "The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds" exhibits the utterly evasive nature of memory and is emblematic of the razor wit of these contributors. Lethem has mined a rich field for this splendid collection of short stories and turned up such authors as Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Martin Amis, Oliver Sacks, Shirley Jackson, Walker Percy, Thomas M. Disch, and Vladimir Nabokov. They're all winners. Bonnie Smothers
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Jonathan Lethem is perhaps our most active literary voice mining the genre margins of our culture.  In this unique collection he creates an anthology that no one else could.  He draws on the work of such unforgettables as Julio Cortazar, who presents a man caught between the ancient and modern worlds unable to say which is real; Philip K. Dick, who tells the story of a man trapped on a spaceship of the somnolent, unable to sleep and slowly losing his mind; Shirley Jackson, who takes us on a nightmarish trip across town with a young secretary; and Oliver Sacks, who presents us with an aging hippie who possesses no memory of anything that has taken place since the early seventies.

What Lethem has done is nothing less than define a new genre of literature-the amnesia story-and in the process he invites us to sit down, pick up the book, and begin to forget.

Also including: John Franklin Bardin, Donald Barthelme, Thomas M. Disch, Karn Joy Fowler, David Grand, Anna Kavan, Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien, Edmund White, and many others.

Jonathan Lethem lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Motherless Brooklyn is coming from Vintage in Fall 2000.