Leonard Michaels Books In Order

The Men’s Club

Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men’s club, the purpose of which isn t immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk. First published in 1981, The Men s Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll The New York Times Book Review.

Sylvia

First acclaimed as a story length memoir, then expanded into a novel, Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self destructive violence. Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.

A Girl with a Monkey

Michaels, one of the most highly regarded contemporary American literary figures and widely read by the discerning public, has long been regarded as a master of the short story. His stature can only be enhanced by this gathering of the best of his previous work as well as new stories, all of them written within the period of the early 1960s to the 1990s. Love and sexuality are the twin themes he continues to mine, and the specific situations he creates to explore these themes pinpoint in the sheerest of prose the absolute truth about relationships. Michael’s trenchant, direct, and lyrical style, with not one word wasted, works as a tight springboard for conveying his vast knowledge about why we love who we love. No library’s short story collection is complete without this career defining compilation.

The Collected Stories

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.

A Cat

Elegantly illustrated and attractively designed, a collection of brief, witty and insightful observations on cats and their idiosyncracies by an acclaimed writer makes a unique keepsake for feline fanciers. Lit Guild Feat Alt.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and 60s and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the 70s and 80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels’s highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he s asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word relationship, or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page. The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters. 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 Men s Club. Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and 60s and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the 70s and 80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels s highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he s asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word relationship, or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page. The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters. ‘ The Essays of Leonard Michaels showcases Michaels’s timing, wit and instinctively good prose. Whatever the subject matter and the essays here range from Edward Hopper to the Rita Hayworth vehicle ‘Gilda’ to Yiddish, his first language Michaels channels the full force of his intellectual and narrative abilities into a voice that is at once sensitive and unyielding…
His sarcasm and darkness are deployed in moderation, and this collection edited by his widow, Katherine Ogden Michaels steams forward largely on his urgent desire to understand what he can of the world.’ Megan Busky, The New York Times Book Review ‘ The Essays of Leonard Michaels showcases Michaels’s timing, wit and instinctively good prose. Whatever the subject matter and the essays here range from Edward Hopper to the Rita Hayworth vehicle ‘Gilda’ to Yiddish, his first language Michaels channels the full force of his intellectual and narrative abilities into a voice that is at once sensitive and unyielding…
His sarcasm and darkness are deployed in moderation, and this collection edited by his widow, Katherine Ogden Michaels steams forward largely on his urgent desire to understand what he can of the world.’ Megan Busky, The New York Times Book Review’As fine and original a prose stylist as this country was lucky enough to have.’ Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World’A collection of brilliant, funny, uncategorizable pieces published for the first time under one cover…
The collection is divided into critical and autobiographical essays, but the distinction is almost arbitrary…
Throwing memoiristic associations into pieces an aside on beautiful women in one about Saul Bellow, for example Michaels creates intimacy with the reader; it’s as if we’re looking over his shoulder as he struggles with issues of craft and form. In fact, reading this collection feels less like an encounter with a book whose positions have been carved and sanded than a conversation with a guy in a cafeteria, his hands waving to catch an image, pieces of Danish flying from his fast mouth…
In ‘My Yiddish,’ the last piece Michaels completed before dying of complications from lymphoma in 2003, his ideas about Jews, language and meaning mount to a stunning crescendo.’ Laurie Stone, Los Angeles Times Book Review’A great pleasure…
These are wonderful, surprising essays…
Sharp, funny, opinionated, observant, concise.’ Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe’The new book that dazzled me the most this past year, and that I loved the most, was The Essays of Leonard Michaels…
It has some of the greatest essays I know; they will break your heart and excite your thinking at the same time.’ Phillip Lopate, TheMillions. com’Emotionally responsive and intensely intellectual…
Michaels’s essays are jewels of experimentation in understanding and feeling.’ Gerald Sorin, Haaretz’A collection of articles by celebrated author Michaels. Divided into two distinct halves, the volume serves as an assemblage of the author’s nonfiction work, much of which was published late in his life…
The best essay is ‘The Zipper,’ which centers on Rita Hayworth’s role in Gilda and the emotional reaction it caused in the teenaged Michaels. The story successfully synergizes the book’s two halves, ably combining the critical eye of the first section with the self reflection of the second.’ Kirkus Reviews’In this definitive collection of short nonfiction essays by Michaels, we find two smaller collections of essays critical and biographical. Michaels analyzes story parts and the origins of the word relationship and its deeper meaning in literature; he pays tribute to an anonymous author, all the while philosophizing and quoting Sartre, Genet, Plato, Joyce, Montaigne, and the Bible. The author writes of being the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, learning English from a neighbor, and growing up in New York City, and he describes his time spent in Michigan, California, and France, among other places…
Michaels explains that we write about ourselves to learn about ourselves, and he acknowledges that trying to write nonfiction is an act of insanity.’ David L. Reynolds, Library Journal’These essays, spare and elegant as Michaels alights on a range of subjects, follow the late writer’s own precept: ‘I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and thus tend always to write about ourselves.’ This pungent collection, by a quizzical New York Jew who never quite assimilated, divides into two sections: critical essays and autobiographical essays. Many of these works first appeared in the Threepenny Review, among other publications. The first part includes a brilliant essay ‘On Love’ and another on ‘Having Trouble with My Relationship.’ The latter breezily covers figures as diverse as Pope, Larkin, Heidegger and Kafka. Other figures and subjects blowing through these pages include Bellow, Nabokov, Kubrick, Edward Hopper, Wallace Stevens Rita Hayworth, and how to watch a movie. The best and most penetrating essays come in the second section, as Michaels gives a wincing account of family bedtime stories on pogroms a happier set of epiphanies on his father, a wise Yiddish speaking barber; and yet another describing fish out of water experiences at Berkeley. All told, these are soul baring occasional pieces by a writer’s writer and a master stylist.’ Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsEditor s NoteI . CRITICAL ESSAYSWhat s a Story? The Story of Judah and TamarThe Story of JonahBad BloodOn LoveI m Having Trouble with My RelationshipOn RavelsteinLegible DeathThe Horns of MosesBeckmann s FacesMasks and LiesThe Nothing That Isn t There: Edward HopperII . AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYSTo Feel These ThingsThe ZipperLiterary TalkMy FatherThe Abandoned HouseA Sentimental MemoirA Berkeley MemoirKishkasWriting About MyselfMy Yiddish