Harold Brodkey

These 17 short stories represent the best of Brodkey's work over three decades.

Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Harold Brodkey's masterful first volume of short fiction, with two never-before anthologized stories. When originally published in 1958, First Love and Other Sorrows won Harold Brodkey widespread acclaim and announced a brilliant new arrival on the literary scene. Brodkey was hailed as an "unusually gifted writer" (The Atlantic) and a "rich talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), whose stories read like "murmured confidences, highly personal yet carefully contrived" (Chicago Tribune). In First Love and Other Sorrows, the young Brodkey chronicles the world of the educated and affluent middle class of the 1950s, at leisure and in love. He establishes the themes that would appear throughout his career--the painful uncertainties of childhood, the halting intimacies of social life--with rare terness, humor, and haunting insight. Two new stories, never before collected, from Brodkey's early writings join the original volume to complete a much-loved classic.

Stories

First Love and Other Sorrows

Primo amore e altri affanni

The Runaway Soul

Untitled Novel Brodkey

Short Stories

A collection of nine short stories explores the emotions and experiences of upper middle class Americans

Growing up in Venice in the 1930s, Niles, the son of an expatriate American novelist, loves a Venetian boy known as Onni. After the Second World War, Niles and his mother return to Venice, and he becomes involved in a complex on-again, off-again affair with his childhood friend, now an adolescent with a wartime history of sexual trespass.

Profane Friendship

From Harold Brodkey come three remarkable stories about the brief lives of two women and the troubling appearance of an angel above Harvard University Considered by many to be among the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, Harold Brodkey created fiction that startled, provoked, and often confounded. These three novellas, told through the recollections of fictional alter ego, Wiley Silenowicz, serve as sterling examples of Brodkey’s magnificent talent. In “Ceil,” Wiley imagines the mother he never knew, brilliantly reinventing the woman who died when he was a child of two, creating a parent both idealized and painfully real. In “Lila,” Wiley remembers his adoptive mother, an unloving and unlovable, self-involved woman, whose early death from cancer left a permanent void in his family. And in “Angel,”the book’s remarkable closing piece, Wiley recalls a heavenly visitation that came to him and many others while studying at Harvard University, and which heralded a truth most difficult to bear. For lovers of literature who have yet to experience Brodkey’s unique style, soaring language, and conceptual brilliance, Women and Angels is a marvelous introduction to an American master.

Women and Angels

A collection of essays, profiles, and film reviews chronicles the author's reflections on a wide variety of subjects

Essays

Sea Battles on Dry Land

The Story of My Death

This Wild Darkness

Harold Brodkey's haunting, lyrical portrait of his most beloved city. Venice is a separate country," Harold Brodkey wrote of the fabled city that became his literary muse. "It floats at anchor inside its own will, among its domes and campanili, independent and exotic at its heart."The author's love of Venice--its churches and vaporetti, its capacity to bewilder and seduce--brought him back time and again to the shores of the Adriatic in search of fresh inspiration. Brodkey's Venice is marked by powerful contrasts: pride beside humility, the sacred alongside the profane, solemn tradition coexisting with exuberant mercantile optimism. Illustrated with eleven stunning black-and-white portraits by the legary Italian photographer Giuseppe Bruno, My Venice combines passages from several of Brodkey's great works with previously unpublished notes and essays to create a text as rich, subtle, and beguiling as the city itself.

My Venice

Angela Praesent

Die Geschichte meines Todes

In Profane Friendship, Harold Brodkey tells an odd and strangely beautiful Venetian love story, sounding its depths with the suppleness and virtuosity of style that in recent years have won him worldwide admiration as a uniquely gifted American writer. Growing up in Venice in the 1930s, Niles O'Hara, the son of an expatriate American novelist, loves a Venetian boy named Giangiacomo Gallieni, fondly known as Onni. After the Second World War, Niles and his mother return to Venice, and he becomes involved in a complex on-again, off-again affair with his childhood friend, now an adolescent with a wartime history of sexual trespass. Profane Friendship is a remarkable depiction of an intense and enduring relationship conducted in the triumphantly alluring setting of the world's most beautiful city. Searching, comic, romantic, and ironic. Harold Brodkey's novel is at once the most sumptuous modern evocation of Venice and a truly singular exploration of human emotion and passion. Growing up in Venice in the 1930s, Niles O'Hara, the son of an expatriate writer, befriends a Venetian boy. After the war, Niles and his family return, and he becomes involved in a kind of semi-affair with his childhood friend, who is now an adolescent with a wartime history of sexual trespass.

Adopted as a child in 1930, Wiley Silenowicz is raised in the St. Louis home of his cousins, S.L. and Lila Silenowicz, and their daughter, Nonie, in a coming-of-age story that follows Wiley from childhood to adulthood

Growing up in Venice in the 1930's, Niles O'Hara, the son of an expatriate writer, befriends a Venetian boy, Giangiacomo Gallieni. After the war, Niles and his family return, and he becomes involved in a kind of semi-affair with his childhood friend, who is now an adolescent with a wartime history of sexual trespass. Searching, comic, romantic, and ironic, Profane Friendship is a remarkable study of a strange, provocative, powerful relationship conducted in the matchlessly human-scaled, triumphantly beautiful setting of the world's most alluring city.

Un uomo, uno scrittore, scopre nel 1993, con sorpresa (le sue sporadiche avventure omosessuali risalivano agli anni Sessanta e Settanta, e non era più a rischio dal 1977), di avere l'Aids e di essere condannato a morte. Quest'uomo è Harold Brodkey, uno dei più eccelsi prosatori contemporanei, e la “storia...della sua morte” diventa non tanto un diario di fatti (i progressi della malattia, il decadimento fisico), ma il resoconto di due anni di continuo stato di grazia creativo, due anni di straordinaria lucidità, due anni di “vita vera” concessi proprio dall'imminenza della fine. Il risultato è un'opera asciutta e minutamente cesellata, un libro estremo, un classico contemporaneo capace di toccare le profondità abissali di un racconto come La morte di Ivan ll'ic di Tolstoj. È l'indimenticabile testimonianza di un uomo che affronta la morte a occhi aperti e riflette sul toccante rapporto che lo lega alla moglie amatissima, su un'ultima vacanza a Venezia, sulle circostanze della vita quotidiana; ma soprattutto si serve dell'esperienza del morire per raggiungere con la sua scrittura la sincerità assoluta, la chiarezza definitiva, perfino - ed è l'ultimo paradosso - un'assurda felicità. (Dalla copertina).

Questo buio feroce. Storia della mia morte

The Abundant Dreamer

The final short story collection that completes the extraordinary literary voyage of Harold Brodkey, a modern master of short fiction; his most forceful and incisive collection of all.

Harold Brodkey

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