The author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn now beguiles his readers nine times over into the ironic, heartbroken, eerie, and absurd territory he has made forever his own. Men and Cartoons is a place where superheroes take tenured positions at colleges, where innermost secrets are blurted in baroque dinner-party games, where a magical spray-product reveals that which two tormented lovers have concealed from one another, where sheep bred for suicide defy the imperatives of their creators, and where the smallest moments of life, from fitting a pair of glasses to choosing a record to play during a tryst, become unexpectedly revelatory, uncanny, and hilarious.

In these nine tales Lethem brings his quarry into the light: men, not boys, caught in the act of never completely growing up.