Michael Brodsky

A Novel

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"Three Goat Songs" is a series of variations on a theme. It is divided into three novellas, each about a man who sits on a rocky coast by the seashore, contemplating. Herbs of goats come there to graze. The man is a husband and father of two children. "Three Goat Songs" is an exploration into the existential boundaries, in the "sea-bounded goat world." It is a philosophical look at the essential sameness and, at the same time, the diversity of all stories. It has in common with the other books of Michael Brodsky the theme of the protagonist's struggle to survive, and more than that, to comprehend. Together, this body of work has led critics to compare the writing of Michael Brodsky to that of the masters like Dostoevsky, Becket, Joyce.

Three Goat Songs

As he searches for himself in a turbulent and confusing world, a man tries to reunite a dying father with his son and struggles to remain the narrator of his own story.

Dyad

In We Can Report Them, Bert, the director of an unorthodox TV commercial, aims to canonize a serial killer as a viable cultural hero. Pudd, the serial killer, has undergone a pseudoreligious conversion. These two, plus Joyce, a patient combating her fatal disease on any terms but the real ones, all seek answers through creation, expressing their unique slant on what passes for reality in defiance of authority.

We Can Report Them

A cryptic tale of Xman's adventures in New York City as he is confronted by a series of the city's more peculiar residents

Xman

Michael Hafftka

Project, and Other Short Pieces

A new collection of short fiction by the award-winning author of Three Goat Songs includes the title novella and "Ferry," "Bagatelle," "The Assessed," "Partridges," "The $50,000 a Year Man," and "The Son, He Must Not Know." Simultaneous. IP.

Southernmost and Other Stories

Detour

Lurianics tells the story of a youngish man – one Isaac Luria (namesake of one of the world's great Kabbalists) – who seeks to create a "true work" which will give his life a meaning that is uniquely beyond label. Set on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the novel anatomizes this unlikely hero's ambivalence-racked relationships with a veritable cast of thousands, all of whom have one thing in common – a craving to derail his every attempt to get on with the job. They include: a smugly go-getting kid brother, a hyper-articulate mystery woman, and assorted bosses, co-workers, composers and filmmakers living and dead, ballet stars, murdered doormen, stuff-strutting sparrows, and honey locusts about to bloom. But chaos does not always reign supreme and in the end every encounter plays its part in forcing Luria to confront the ultimate question: Does he have the guts not just to erect his Valhalla (any fool can do that) but to erect it with the only building blocks worth a damn, i.e., the very things befouling the path?

Lurianics

Detour charts the struggle of a film-crazed young man to shape his identity; it is also about his resistance to doing so at every turn. Owning an identity can mean being straitjacketed, condemned to a living death; language becomes both an escape from the straitjacket and its evilest genius. Detour is also a story of first love, as it concerns the intense, transient sexual relationship between the young man, who is very reluctant about to enter medical school in the Midwest, and a rootless former heroin addict named Anne. The hero of Detour experiences movies the way Don Quixote responds to the romances of chilvary—as being infinitely more real than anything else in the world. Hence the connections relentlessly made between his own often Bresson, Welles, Fellini, Ophüls, Sternberg, Sirk, Karlson and Godard. Camera movements, cuts, dissolves, tension between sound and image—these torment, fascinate, liberate and exalt, because they seem to lie just beyond the vampire clutch of words, thoughts, analysis. It is within such contexts that one begins to understand the “detours”—social, psychological, familial, erotic, existential—that frustrate and enrich the protagonist’s quest for love, for connectedness, for the satisfactions of a calling. As well as the artistic detours that are crucial to depicting his complex, lacerated, maturation. It is by means of a technique that has truly absorbed the formal lessons of the novel and through an extraordinary command of language—and of the many different languages inside language: colloquial, technical, abstract—that Brodsky makes this account of the growth of the self so unnervingly new and unpredictable. In sentence after sentence, he manages to discharge the shock of the unknown, the unspeakable, the never before said. Detour is a vastly expanded version of the novel that received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation of the PEN American Center in 1979

Michael Brodsky

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