The Collected Stories

From the Publisher

"Larky, fifully brilliant, as profane as they are aphoristic, Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth. Like theirs, Michaels's vernacular achieves the level of song ... ["Murderers"] measures up to that other masterpiece about a young boy on a rooftop, Philip Roth's "Converstion of the Jews" ... Michaels's later work contains his greatest writing ... The seven astonishing Nachmann stories ... consider moral problems freshly. All the ornament seems burned off, purified; the narratives distilled and gorgeously plain, as only a great stylist's can become. Less crackling than the earlier work, they're smoother in the mouth, stark in form. Michaels was writing more Nachmann stories when he died. If finished and published together, they might have made a novel. As it is, they're seven irregular beauties, to be read again and again." —The New York Times Book Review

"[Michaels's] every page reveals the mark of an extraordinarily original and gifted talent."—William Styron

"Anyone concerned with the American short story should read and know these stories."—Charles Baxter, San Francisco Chronicle

"Though Michaels, who died in 2003 at the age of 70, is probably best known for his novel The Men's Club (1981), these 38 stories attest to his skill as a short story writer. Readers coming to Michaels's work for the first time will find the early, pointed stories from his noteworthy collections, Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could as well as some of his later works that have never been collected. Michaels's early stories are written with a frantic sexuality that displays his distinctive dark humor. In 'Fingers and Toes,' recurring characters Henry and Phillip weigh the value of their friendship against their encounters with the same woman through a set of urban hallucinations characteristic of the early stories. Raphael Nachman, the icon of Michaels's later fiction, is an aging mathematician at UCLA and a surprising foil to Michaels's usual kinetic energy. In the first Nachman story, the professor takes a guest lectureship in his ancestral Poland and tries to reconcile his analytical yet peaceful view of the world with his family's history. Fans of the author should be thrilled at having such a wide body of work between two covers."—Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

All the short works of a master. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Mona Simpson

Larky, fitfully brilliant, as profane as they are aphoristic, Leonard Michaels’s stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries — Grace Paley and Philip Roth. ... All the ornament seems burned off, purified; the narratives distilled and gorgeously plain, as only a great stylist’s can become.
—The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

The collected fiction of the brilliant Leonard Michaels (1933-2003). In this galvanizing book, the stories of Michaels's debut, Going Places (1969), as well as I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), are reprinted, one example of his talent after another. In "Manikin," a college coed is raped by a Turkish exchange student and, as a result, abandoned by her Ivy League fiance. In "The Deal," a woman nervously negotiates with 20 raucous neighborhood boys for her stolen glove. In "Murderers," the extravagant sex play of a newly married rabbi and his young wife leads to the death of one of the local youths who routinely spy on them. Fiction from three other volumes-Shuffle (1990), To Feel These Things (1993) and A Girl with a Monkey (2000)-is also offered. Sex and violence are salvation for some of the characters, as revenge is for others. Most of the protagonists, one generation past the Holocaust, live their lives in hot pursuit of something, anything. They just don't know what. Also here are the previously uncollected Nachman stories, which Michaels was preparing for a book when he died. Starring the redoubtable Nachman-a renowned mathematician who lives alone, continuously puzzled by human relationships, by almost everything, really, save the beauty and logic of numbers-these stories are written in a controlled, elegant style that transforms the rapacious search for meaning that marked the author's earlier work into a sublime meditation on love and life. With this volume, Michaels can take his place next to other exemplars of the American short story, Malamud, Paley, O'Connor and Cheever.