Friday 56 & #BookBeginnings: Lucky Alan

For Book Beginnings:

In the months after I'd auditioned for him, I would run into the legendary theater director Sigismund Blondy at the movies, near-empty Thursday matinees of indifferent first-run films—North Country, Wednesday Crashers—in the decaying venues of the Upper East Side, where we both lived: the Crown, the Clearview, the Gemini; big rooms chopped into asymmetric halves or quartered through the balcony.

- p. 1, from the short story "Lucky Alan"

For Friday 56:  

He was getting his morning thrill on, his eye-opener, and this place, besides from being on the right corner of the right block for him to stumble in, made a fine joltingly strong concoction strictly from the addict's point of view.

- p. 56, from the short story "Procedure in Plain Air"

About Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Letham: Jonathan Lethem’s third collection of stories uncovers a father’s nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in “Pending Vegan”; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in “Traveler Home”; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in “Procedure in Plain Air”; and a crumbling, haunted “blog” on a seaside cliff in “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear.” Each of these locates itself in Lethem-land, which can be discovered only by visiting. As in his celebrated novels, Lethem finds the uncanny lurking in the mundane, the irrational self-defeat seeping through our upstanding pursuits, and the tragic undertow of the absurd world(s) in which we live.