Books by JRL. Click to buy.

Happyland. 2006. A blackly comic novel about a doll and children's book CEO who buys an entire small town. An abridged version was serialized in Harper's Magazine starting in the summer and fall of 2006. The cover image comes from a paperback unabridged edition of 25 that I had printed up for family and friends. With any luck there will be a trade edition, too. . . . Mailman. Novel, W. W. Norton and Granta, 2003. A frenetic bildungsroman about a doomed mailman. Read an excerpt in Granta 82. Irving Mailin, Review of Contemporary Fiction: "The secret of this extraordinary work is that letters--written words--are our salvation. Mailman is, finally, a radiant mirror of the days of our lives--a triumphant work of art." David Henderson, Library Journal: "Like Joseph Heller's John Yossarian and Ken Kesey's Randle McMurphy, Alfred Lippincott, Lennon's titular mailman, is destined to become one of the great characters in American literature... This is black comedy at its best." . . . The Funnies. Novel, Riverhead Books and Granta, 1999. A failed installation artist inherits his father's syndicated comic strip, and is forced to come to terms with his dysfunctional family. Salon: "Lennon entertainingly sends up celebrity culture and the new children-of-celebrity culture, but his most substantial achievement is his three-dimensional portraits of Tim and Pierce...The novel...makes large what the real funnies make small." The New Yorker: "Psychologically nuanced, richly detailed, and unexpectedly comic."

Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes. Granta Books, 2005. 100 very short stories. See the Inverse Room page (click "music") for the companion CD of the same title. The book isn't yet available in the US, but click the photo at right to buy a copy from Amazon.co.uk. The Guardian: "These are stories about connections - sometimes meaningful, but often mysterious, or conjured out of random coincidence in our efforts to make moral sense of the world...intriguing and graceful." . . . On the Night Plain. Novel, Henry Holt and Granta, 2001. After the Second World War, a man leaves his home on a Great Plains sheep ranch. He returns to chaos and despair, and decides to devote himself to setting things right. The New York Times: "The kind of book that steals slowly into the reader's sympathy...An utterly convincing evocation of hard lives...impressive." Publisher's Weekly: "A terse and haunting story that speaks of the inescapable bonds of blood, the ineluctable hold of the land and the healing powers of work and solitude." . . . The Light of Falling Stars. Novel, Riverhead Books and Granta, 1997. The lives of five people are changed by a plane crash in a small Montana town. Winner of Barnes & Noble's 1997 Discover Great New Writers Award San Francisco Chronicle: "A memorable first novel...Lennon's lushly descriptive style speaks directly and metaphorically at the same time.... A voice with real promise." Publisher's Weekly: "[An] ambitious, elegiac debut...[Lennon] paints a world tinged with loss, adeptly showing us sentiments left unspoken, relationships forever left dangling, silent moments of grief...lucid and graceful even in his characters' darkest hours."