A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories
Some of the pieces are little more than exercises ... Others remind us how consistently ambitious Lethem has been in his practice of the short form ... Program’s Progress’ is an entertaining satirical allegory ... As a short-fiction writer, Lethem was at his strongest — his most limber, lucid, inventive and wise — for around a decade starting in the early to mid-2000s ... The Empty Room,a delicious fable about domestic clutter … resembles a Don DeLillo take on Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? ... A good Lethem story exhausts the juiciest permutations of a scenario while managing not to outstay its welcome ... Wickedly unnerving ... Excellent.
Lethem’s prodigious imagination and clever wordplay permeate each story, building both reality-adjacent and surrealist worlds with a playful wink.
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A winner for readers seeking a fast-moving romp through sci-fi premises and futuristic settings without a lot of violence.
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