Leonard Michaels

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 Novel

Sylvia

The late author's short fiction, from his debut in 1969 to his uncollected last stories that have been unavailable since they appeared in print in publications such as The New Yorker, are brought together in a collection that includes works from Going Places.

The Collected Stories

A volume of the author's nonfiction works traces his youth and early career experiences in mid-twentieth century New York.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels

A Cat

Seven men, friends and strangers gathered to form a men's club, become engaged in a progressively revealing encounter, stripping away their masks and uncovering the violence, lusts, miseries, and loves that lie beneath

The Men's Club

Thirteen stories focus on both unexpected and carefully planned visions and versions of sexual experience and erotic thought in the uncertain, often impersonal contemporary city

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

Essays

To Feel These Things

The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995

Time out of Mind

While the mystery of the cat can never ultimately be defined, Michaels comes as close as possible to revealing its essence. A cat is content to be a cat. A cat is not owned by anybody. A cat imagines things about you, nothing you can know for sure. A cat reminds us that much in this world remains unknown. In his novels, stories, and essays, Leonard Michaels proved himself to be one of the most incisive observers of human behavior, but few know that he was every bit as perspicacious a chronicler of America’s favorite pet: the domestic cat. Elusive, elegant, and often humorous—much like his subject—Michaels gives us this unfathomable animal as we have never quite seen it before, and yet as we have always known it to be. Through a series of meditations, aphorisms, and anecdotes, along with original illustrations from Frances Lerner, A Cat is a both a compendium of feline behavior and a love letter to this marvelous creature.

The Nachman Stories

Il club degli uomini

Considers a wide range of topics related to contemporary language

The State of the Language

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

Alan Sillitoe

Joyce Carol Oates

John Banville

William Trevor

Paul Bowles

Bruce Jay Friedman

Jerome Charyn

William Goldman

Malcolm Bradbury

John Updike

John McPhee

Austin Clarke

Sol Yurick

Thomas Bridges

Jay Neugeboren

George Garrett

Daniel Spicehandler

Jean Claude Van Itallie

Penelope Gilliatt

Harry D. Miller

Alfred Chester

Victor Sawdon Pritchett

Frank Tuohy

Irvin Faust

Morris Lurie

Asa Baber

Paul Breslow

Hugh Allyn Hunt

Edward Franklin

Norma Meacock

Virginia Moriconi

Shirley Schoonover

Walter Clemons

Stories from the Transatlantic Review

Fiction.A Lost Angeles Times Best Fiction Title of 2000. Finalist, 2000 Bay Area Book Reviewers Fiction Award. "Brilliant... Anyone concerned with the American short story should read and know these stories.... Other American writers have tried to write stories like these, but Leonard Michaels got there first and has done it better than almost anyone else."—Charles Baxter, San Francisco Chronicle "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 through 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. Michaels'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."—Brad Hooper, Booklist

New and Selected Stories

A Girl with a Monkey

Christopher Ricks

Fifty new contributors have written essays and poems that engage the English language as it is today. This new edition includes "bad language" that has lately done so well in today's society.

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).

Leonard Michaels

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