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J Robert Lennon

(b.1970)

J. Robert Lennon is the author seven novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Happyland, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise. The latter will be published by Graywolf Press in November. He teaches writing at Cornell University.

Awards: B&N (1997)

Genres: Mystery, General Fiction

New and upcoming books

March 2025

Buzz Kill
(Jane and Lila Pool, book 2)

Series

Jane and Lila Pool
1. Hard Girls (2024)
2. Buzz Kill (2025)

Novels

   The Light of Falling Stars (1997)
   The Funnies (1999)
   On the Night Plain (2001)
   Mailman (2003)
   Castle (2009)
   Familiar (2012)
   Happyland (2013)
   Broken River (2017)
   Subdivision (2021)

Collections

   Pieces for the Left Hand (2005)
   See You in Paradise (2014)
   The Great Zombini: Plus! Twenty Other Stories! (2019) (with Lou Beach)
   Let Me Think (2021)

Non fiction show

Books containing stories by J Robert Lennon

Small Odysseys (2022)
Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories
edited by
Hannah Tinti

Super Stories of Heroes & Villains (2013)
edited by
Claude Lalumière

Fakes (2012)
An Anthology of Pseudo-interviews, Faux-lectures, Quasi-letters,
edited by
David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

More books

Awards

1997 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize for Fiction : The Light of Falling Stars

J Robert Lennon recommends

Big Chief (2025)
Jon Hickey
"All politics is local meets all unhappy families in this comical, humane, and profound debut - a deftly observed meditation on what it means to be a brother, a son, a leader, and a man. Jon Hickey is a newly minted master of slapstick American misery, and Big Chief a big-hearted book, a big mood for the big mess we're all in."

Julia (2023)
Sandra Newman
"This extraordinary novel is like a newly discovered room in your house, in a dream - the illusion is so precise, the execution so masterful, that you think it must have been there all along, just waiting for you to find it. Sandra Newman has succeeded wildly at the impossible task she was given; JULIA should surprise and delight not only devotees of Orwell's classic, but fans of Newman's own daring, disquieting, and emotionally affecting oeuvre."

Endpapers (2023)
Jennifer Savran Kelly
"Part portrait of the artist, part queer coming-of-age, and part investigative puzzle, this intimate, emotional novel parlays romance, passion, politics, and history into a compelling tale, beautifully and insightfully told. Jennifer Savran Kelly is an exciting, empathetic new voice."

The Silverberg Business (2022)
Robert Freeman Wexler
"This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir--at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque--is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail."

Sleepwalk (2022)
Dan Chaon
"Dan Chaon just keeps getting better, stranger, and harder to predict. Sleepwalk is an amiable apocalyptic epic, narrated by the sweetest, most charming deadly itinerant mercenary I've encountered in fiction, and it never fails to surprise and delight. To every pandemic survivor haunting the earth with their phone at 3 percent, this creepy, weirdly optimistic campfire tale is for you."

Drowning Practice (2022)
Mike Meginnis
"This dreamlike novel reinvents the apocalypse to explore the moral ambiguities of family love, social convention, and the creative imagination. It's scary and funny and completely surprising. With Drowning Practice, Mike Meginnis has given us a startling and moving meditation on a world forever roiled by and in recovery from catastrophe - that is to say, a world much like ours."

We Have Always Been Here (2021)
Lena Nguyen
"We Have Always Been Here is an extraordinary, multifarious debut a white-knuckle adventure, a wrenching love story, a confounding intellectual puzzle, and a masterful inquiry into the nature of consciousness. Lena Nguyen has done with her first book something that takes most writers decades. It's all in here, and it's all fantastic."

The Hotel Neversink (2019)
Adam O'Fallon Price
"An astounding literary feat."

Costalegre (2019)
Courtney Maum
"An astounding literary feat,"

The Third Hotel (2018)
Laura van den Berg
"Always vivid . . . There's no denying [van den Berg's] skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory . . . Read [The Third Hotel] as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents."

Severance (2018)
Ling Ma
"Ling Ma has given us a terrifyingly plausible vision of our collective future, one in which our comforts have become pathology and our habits death?and, in her protagonist, a hero who doesn’t know if she should be seeking salvation or oblivion. And yet, somehow, Severance could easily be the funniest book of the year. It’s a brilliant, deadpan novel of survival, in this world and in the precarious world to come."

Funeral Platter (2017)
Greg Ames
"Unhinged literary brilliance."

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