Synopses & Reviews
“Leonard Michaelss stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth.” —Mona Simpson,
The New York Times Book Review “Leonard Michaels was an original . . . with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab.” —Phillip Lopate, The Nation
“As good as any writer youre likely to run across.” —Alex Abramovich, Bookforum
Review
"Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries — Grace Paley and Philip Roth." Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Leonard Michaels was an original . . . with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab." Phillip Lopate, The Nation
Review
"During the summer of 2001, a New York editor asked me which contemporary American writer I most admired. I replied, 'Leonard Michaels.' After a pause, he posed another question, albeit one that already contained its answer: 'Hasn't his star fallen?'....Now, however, as Michaels's original publisher has just begun reissuing his out-of-print work while bringing uncollected material to light, the injustice of such a foreclosure becomes uncomfortably apparent. For if his public fate, which is to say his commercial one, could not be disputed, his private fate, which is to say his artistic one, cannot be denied: it turns out that Leonard Michaels completed his finest work late in life. To read through The Collected Stories, a new omnibus volume, is to see that the author's five decades of short fiction argue effortlessly for a place beside the work of America's paragons of the story form." Wyatt Mason, Harper's Magazine (Read the entire )
Synopsis
Leonard Michaels was a master of the short story. His collections are among the most admired, influential, and exciting of the last half century. The Collected Stories brings them back into print, from the astonishing debut Going Places (1969) to the uncollected last stories, unavailable since they appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, and Partisan Review.
At every stage in his career, Michaels produced taut, spare tales of sex, love, and other adult intimacies: gossip, argument, friendship, guilt, rage. A fearless writer--"destructive, joyful, brilliant, purely creative," in the words of John Hawkes--Michaels probed his characters' motivations with brutal humor and startling frankness; his ear for the vernacular puts him in the company of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud. Remarkable for its compression and cadences, his prose is nothing short of addictive.
The Collected Stories is a landmark.
"Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries -- Grace Paley and Philip Roth." -- Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
Description
At last, the complete short fiction of an American master.
About the Author
Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) was the author of five collections of stories and essays—Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Shuffle, A Girl with a Monkey, and To Feel These Things—as well as two novels, Sylvia and The Mens Club. All of his fiction will be reissued as FSG Classics.