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È stato detto che Leonard Michaels (New York, 1933 – Berkeley, 2003) «non ha scritto una sola frase noiosa in tutta la sua carriera».
Figlio di un barbiere polacco che aveva studiato da rabbino prima di fuggire assieme alla moglie dal Vecchio Mondo per trovare rifugio nel Lower East Side, il piccolo Leonard parla esclusivamente yiddish fino ai cinque anni, quando incomincia a frequentare la scuola e a familiarizzare con ciò che esiste al di fuori dell’appartamento in cui è confinato per via delle frequenti malattie. L’esordio arriverà nel 1969 con Going Places, una raccolta di racconti che esce lo stesso anno di Il lamento di Portnoy di Philip Roth. Entrambi gli scrittori hanno 36 anni e sono al debutto, entrambi i libri riceveranno grandi encomi ma, al contrario del prolifico Roth, Michaels farà passare sei anni prima di tornare sulle scene con un’altra raccolta, intitolata I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. Altri elogi e poi di nuovo un lungo silenzio. Quando gli chiederanno perché aspettare 47 anni per pubblicare il suo primo romanzo, lo scrittore newyorchese risponderà così: «Mi consideravo un artista serio. La short story mi pareva molto più profonda e seria del romanzo, per questo la preferivo. Quando si scrive un racconto non sono permessi errori. È una forma pura, magica». I romanzi alla fine saranno due: Il club degli uomini (Einaudi), che sarebbe diventato anche un discusso film con Harvey Keitel e Roy Scheider, e Sylvia (Adelphi), ispirato al suo primo matrimonio culminato col suicidio della moglie.
Che il tratto davvero unico di Michaels sia proprio quella lingua così influenzata dal retaggio yiddish sono in molti a sostenerlo ed è difficile non accorgersene leggendo le storie del posato matematico Nachman, un uomo che sembra aver avuto sempre e solo il cognome per definirlo, oppure seguendo le peripezie sessuali e sentimentali dell’alter ego dello scrittore, quel Phillip Liebowitz che si muove per Manhattan al febbrile ritmo della città, imbucandosi alle feste o tentando di prendere la metropolitana nudo dopo essere stato beccato in flagrante. Uomini fatti di parole alle prese col mistero indecifrabile ed elusivo del femminile e con l’ultimo, inevitabile spoiler, quello di un finale annunciato.
«Gli scrittori muoiono due volte, prima nel corpo, poi nelle opere, eppure tirano fuori un libro dopo l’altro, come pavoni che fanno la ruota, uno splendido lampo di colore presto trascinato di nuovo nella polvere» appunta Leonard Michaels nel suo Taccuino, uno dei trentotto racconti che appaiono per la prima volta in italiano nella traduzione di Luca Briasco e Roberto Serrai in questa raccolta definitiva. Un testamento che ci permette di scoprire un autore degno di stare tra i più grandi del Novecento americano.
Figlio di un barbiere polacco che aveva studiato da rabbino prima di fuggire assieme alla moglie dal Vecchio Mondo per trovare rifugio nel Lower East Side, il piccolo Leonard parla esclusivamente yiddish fino ai cinque anni, quando incomincia a frequentare la scuola e a familiarizzare con ciò che esiste al di fuori dell’appartamento in cui è confinato per via delle frequenti malattie. L’esordio arriverà nel 1969 con Going Places, una raccolta di racconti che esce lo stesso anno di Il lamento di Portnoy di Philip Roth. Entrambi gli scrittori hanno 36 anni e sono al debutto, entrambi i libri riceveranno grandi encomi ma, al contrario del prolifico Roth, Michaels farà passare sei anni prima di tornare sulle scene con un’altra raccolta, intitolata I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. Altri elogi e poi di nuovo un lungo silenzio. Quando gli chiederanno perché aspettare 47 anni per pubblicare il suo primo romanzo, lo scrittore newyorchese risponderà così: «Mi consideravo un artista serio. La short story mi pareva molto più profonda e seria del romanzo, per questo la preferivo. Quando si scrive un racconto non sono permessi errori. È una forma pura, magica». I romanzi alla fine saranno due: Il club degli uomini (Einaudi), che sarebbe diventato anche un discusso film con Harvey Keitel e Roy Scheider, e Sylvia (Adelphi), ispirato al suo primo matrimonio culminato col suicidio della moglie.
Che il tratto davvero unico di Michaels sia proprio quella lingua così influenzata dal retaggio yiddish sono in molti a sostenerlo ed è difficile non accorgersene leggendo le storie del posato matematico Nachman, un uomo che sembra aver avuto sempre e solo il cognome per definirlo, oppure seguendo le peripezie sessuali e sentimentali dell’alter ego dello scrittore, quel Phillip Liebowitz che si muove per Manhattan al febbrile ritmo della città, imbucandosi alle feste o tentando di prendere la metropolitana nudo dopo essere stato beccato in flagrante. Uomini fatti di parole alle prese col mistero indecifrabile ed elusivo del femminile e con l’ultimo, inevitabile spoiler, quello di un finale annunciato.
«Gli scrittori muoiono due volte, prima nel corpo, poi nelle opere, eppure tirano fuori un libro dopo l’altro, come pavoni che fanno la ruota, uno splendido lampo di colore presto trascinato di nuovo nella polvere» appunta Leonard Michaels nel suo Taccuino, uno dei trentotto racconti che appaiono per la prima volta in italiano nella traduzione di Luca Briasco e Roberto Serrai in questa raccolta definitiva. Un testamento che ci permette di scoprire un autore degno di stare tra i più grandi del Novecento americano.
588 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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1443 people want to read
About the author
Leonard Michaels
48 books110 followersLeonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
February 17, 2010
This is my new favorite book. There is so much to admire on each page, a turn of phrase that takes away the reader's breath in each paragraph. Leonard Michaels is the writer that writers want to read; he belongs in the pantheon of Chekov, Carver, Dubus - he holds his own in their presence. This is the first book in decades I've immediately re-read upon completion... that's why it has been on my currently-reading list for so long. I'm already preparing to read it again. In the meantime, I'll be acquiring the rest of Michael's canon for my collection...
September 15, 2011
After finishing Stories (and not so long ago, Michaels' short autobiographical novel, Sylvia), I'm surprised that the author isn't more universally celebrated. It could be his ambitious and experimental variations on Philip Roth's eros/thanatos obsessions don't sit well in these politically correct times. Or that Michaels simply didn't produce enough work to warrant entry into the elite 20th century canon. Regardless, these are visceral and immediate stories that are all too rare these days.
July 11, 2014
so i wrote my college essay, the big one, the common app essay, the personal statement, about leonard michaels. did i begin my notes about "sylvia" with that? i'm sure i did. it will now remain always the most relevant aspect to me about leonard michaels. i just checked; yes, i did. the difference between the collected stories and sylvia is that my college essay wasn't about sylvia, which is a "fictional memoir," it was about the short stories, the short stories of leonard michaels. i mean it wasn't about leonard michaels. as i said in the notes on sylvia. i don't want to repeat myself. the point is that leonard michaels has unfairly been invested with a lot of power, private power. not just because of the college essay, but the college essay crystallized that power, if you will, made it manifest, inescapable, gave it all the power given to every writer i have been encouraged to and wanted to venerate. i found sylvia by chance in a used bookstore in evanston. by chance, because it was sylvia. not by chance, because it was leonard michaels, and for years i have looked for leonard michaels wherever i go. some months later, in my senior year, i found the collected stories not by chance in skylight books in los feliz. i don't remember exactly when, but i probably have the receipt taped in a moleskine, and could check, but i remember it was early, too early, to read it. early as in might not have submitted all my college applications yet, and i felt i could not submit college applications featuring an essay written by a self who had not yet found leonard michaels when i had indeed become a self who had now found leonard michaels. so i didn't read the stories. they sat on my bedroom carpet along with other books, many other books, for months, languishing, unread. my books have been colonizing my bedroom carpet, spreading, in no particular clean shape; i could make a metaphor here about the way cancer cells grow in a petri dish; i have been asking for another bookcase in my room for over a year; months passed. I submitted my college applications. I got into various colleges. Months passed. Now it is the summer before my first year of college, just a couple weeks shy of a year since I by chance found Sylvia, and I will be attending college about twenty miles away from the used bookstore in Evanston, and finally I picked up the stories by Leonard Michaels, which I admit I had been avoiding. Books cannot withstand the private power, the hope, you invest in them, if that hope is, what's the word, I can't remember the word, for now let's make up "reasonless." Not unreasonable, but reasonless, almost arbitrary.
What did I want from Leonard Michaels? I don't know. If I knew what reading is for, why people should read, why I read, then I would know. It's unfair for Leonard Michaels, I guess, because I have found in writers what I looked for in Leonard Michaels, but one doesn't like to think the search is over, if the discovery at the end isn't as obviously life-changing or life-defining as one thought. One, also, has a fondness of obscurity; one wants to be hip. What I have looked for in Leonard Michaels I've previously found in Virginia Woolf; in David Foster Wallace; most recently I've found it in Zadie Smith.
This is unfair. Here are some things to say about actually Leonard Michaels, about actually the stories of Leonard Michaels: his early work is zippy and quick and wild, much wilder than I thought it would be, more savage, more fragmentary, more sexual, more Jewish. He makes use of the same characters through stories; I didn't expect that, either. Phillip Liebowitz, mainly, They are raw and slightly surreal sometimes. These are his two story collections. They're short. There is a turning point. "Journal." It's something between the occasional collected vignettes in his second collection and the tone of his later stuff. It is, I think, something near a fictional memoir. The stories afterward are, for the most part, middling. The Nachman stories are good, very good. Different from the early stories, very different. Nachman is far different from Liebowitz. But related, they're related, I suppose. They sound and feel more like how you expect short stories to sound and feel, besides the endings, like all his endings, which are only the endings of sentences, as if the rest of the life is spilling outward into a page you can't see. That is what keeps his stories grounded, real, somehow believable no matter how strange they occasionally get: the sense that they continue, that nothing Ends, not even in the way of a Short Story Ending where you're confused and surprised and not everything's resolved. Not even in that way, though these emotions happen. What happens in the stories feels unresolved in a life way, because life doesn't have plots and conflicts and resolutions, as opposed to being unresolved in an Interesting Writing way, which isn't exactly hollow, because it's all most good writers can do, but makes you too aware of the page when you aren't always meant to be aware of it. This is Leonard Michaels' achievement.
I watched a movie recently, "You Can Count On Me," and one of my favorite parts about it was the way certain scenes you expect were often elided. Because you knew what would happen in them. There was no point. I guess most good fiction, drama, film, what have you, most successful stories, do this, they only put in what you need to see/read/hear, but this movie was the first time I was so aware of it; it did it intentionally, wanted to make you aware of it, the elision. Sometimes so as to wonder what happened there, in between. I thought about this a lot with Leonard Michaels; there's a lot of elision here, both textually and metatextually. It happens with the characters he focuses on, like Liebowitz and Nachman, whom we see at various discrete points in their lives, various different times. Nachman is reliable, steady, changeless—we read about him mostly in middle age, just once in college, always a mathematician. Liebowitz comes and goes, flits in and out of time, not chronologically—teen, young man, child, adult, nearing middle age...always with a different girl, in a different job, always scrambling, always Liebowitz, but a different shade of Liebowitz, how did he get here. Then with the stories made up of separate vignettes; the journal. And then the greatest elisions, unintended: his second collection published in 1975, is next piece of fiction, the journal, from a collection that came out in 1990. The Nachman stories from the 90s, the early 2000s. The transition of focus from Liebowitz to Nachman, the change/maturing in writing style from the franticness of the 70s to the superficial calmness of the 90s. I'll admit I'd read a Leonard Michaels story before I bought this book—the last story in the collection, the last Nachman story, "Cryptology." Well, I didn't read it. I'd listened to it, it had been on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, which for me is pretty close to never having experienced it at all. I'm a bad listener. Being a podcast-listener is for me practically purely aspirational. What I'm saying is I knew how this would end, kind of. The last word of his last story is "infinity." By which I mean I knew nothing at all, because of the way he plays with people and time.
I should mention, because I never stopped noticing it, that Leonard Michaels is weird about women. I think I spent most of my notes about Sylvia talking about this. It was not limited to Sylvia. His men are all fairly gross at at least one point or another. Never before had I been so convinced of the inherent helpless perversity of people as I was while reading Leonard Michaels stories. The thing is, if you want to read well-known male writers from the twentieth century, as I often do, you must read writers who are weird about women. As long as they've got something worthwhile to them, you do what you gotta do. (This is why I still won't read Bukowski.)
What did I want from Leonard Michaels? I don't know. If I knew what reading is for, why people should read, why I read, then I would know. It's unfair for Leonard Michaels, I guess, because I have found in writers what I looked for in Leonard Michaels, but one doesn't like to think the search is over, if the discovery at the end isn't as obviously life-changing or life-defining as one thought. One, also, has a fondness of obscurity; one wants to be hip. What I have looked for in Leonard Michaels I've previously found in Virginia Woolf; in David Foster Wallace; most recently I've found it in Zadie Smith.
This is unfair. Here are some things to say about actually Leonard Michaels, about actually the stories of Leonard Michaels: his early work is zippy and quick and wild, much wilder than I thought it would be, more savage, more fragmentary, more sexual, more Jewish. He makes use of the same characters through stories; I didn't expect that, either. Phillip Liebowitz, mainly, They are raw and slightly surreal sometimes. These are his two story collections. They're short. There is a turning point. "Journal." It's something between the occasional collected vignettes in his second collection and the tone of his later stuff. It is, I think, something near a fictional memoir. The stories afterward are, for the most part, middling. The Nachman stories are good, very good. Different from the early stories, very different. Nachman is far different from Liebowitz. But related, they're related, I suppose. They sound and feel more like how you expect short stories to sound and feel, besides the endings, like all his endings, which are only the endings of sentences, as if the rest of the life is spilling outward into a page you can't see. That is what keeps his stories grounded, real, somehow believable no matter how strange they occasionally get: the sense that they continue, that nothing Ends, not even in the way of a Short Story Ending where you're confused and surprised and not everything's resolved. Not even in that way, though these emotions happen. What happens in the stories feels unresolved in a life way, because life doesn't have plots and conflicts and resolutions, as opposed to being unresolved in an Interesting Writing way, which isn't exactly hollow, because it's all most good writers can do, but makes you too aware of the page when you aren't always meant to be aware of it. This is Leonard Michaels' achievement.
I watched a movie recently, "You Can Count On Me," and one of my favorite parts about it was the way certain scenes you expect were often elided. Because you knew what would happen in them. There was no point. I guess most good fiction, drama, film, what have you, most successful stories, do this, they only put in what you need to see/read/hear, but this movie was the first time I was so aware of it; it did it intentionally, wanted to make you aware of it, the elision. Sometimes so as to wonder what happened there, in between. I thought about this a lot with Leonard Michaels; there's a lot of elision here, both textually and metatextually. It happens with the characters he focuses on, like Liebowitz and Nachman, whom we see at various discrete points in their lives, various different times. Nachman is reliable, steady, changeless—we read about him mostly in middle age, just once in college, always a mathematician. Liebowitz comes and goes, flits in and out of time, not chronologically—teen, young man, child, adult, nearing middle age...always with a different girl, in a different job, always scrambling, always Liebowitz, but a different shade of Liebowitz, how did he get here. Then with the stories made up of separate vignettes; the journal. And then the greatest elisions, unintended: his second collection published in 1975, is next piece of fiction, the journal, from a collection that came out in 1990. The Nachman stories from the 90s, the early 2000s. The transition of focus from Liebowitz to Nachman, the change/maturing in writing style from the franticness of the 70s to the superficial calmness of the 90s. I'll admit I'd read a Leonard Michaels story before I bought this book—the last story in the collection, the last Nachman story, "Cryptology." Well, I didn't read it. I'd listened to it, it had been on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, which for me is pretty close to never having experienced it at all. I'm a bad listener. Being a podcast-listener is for me practically purely aspirational. What I'm saying is I knew how this would end, kind of. The last word of his last story is "infinity." By which I mean I knew nothing at all, because of the way he plays with people and time.
I should mention, because I never stopped noticing it, that Leonard Michaels is weird about women. I think I spent most of my notes about Sylvia talking about this. It was not limited to Sylvia. His men are all fairly gross at at least one point or another. Never before had I been so convinced of the inherent helpless perversity of people as I was while reading Leonard Michaels stories. The thing is, if you want to read well-known male writers from the twentieth century, as I often do, you must read writers who are weird about women. As long as they've got something worthwhile to them, you do what you gotta do. (This is why I still won't read Bukowski.)
August 14, 2012
I get a sweet and sickly feeling from these stories. The content is NY and there's a draw to better times to big city life, but I've been hooked by the writing style. Sentences are clipped just so...everything is said just so...the reader is given information just so. I can't love this book, it is not something to love, it is not warm or piercing or triumphant, but it IS something good to read by a good writer.
August 30, 2008
Ratty dysfunctional New York, self-hating Jewish intellectuals, peeping Toms outside the rabbi's window: Leonard Michaels, bookworm and seducer, lived through the tumult of the late 60s and early 70s, when downtown living was cheap and rough. Boy does he have stories to tell. Few writers manage prose as lean and poetic as Michaels does in this collection.
July 22, 2017
Incredible writing; a little too much testosterone for me, I guess, especially the earlier stories. The Nachman stories are so mature and so perfect, though.
February 18, 2014
I read The Collected Stories occasionally over about a year. These stories range from ebullient to lethargic and always carry, at their core, a tough kernel of sadness that transforms commonplace observation into surprisingly insightful moments. I don't know why Michaels isn't more widely known and read, or why he isn't mentioned more often as an influence on innumerable short authors today. Highly recommended.
April 25, 2021
The word that comes to mind is "intelligent." Even across the 6 of these stories that I read, I was blown away by the different voices/genres. I particularly liked "I Would Have Saved Them if I Could" - meta literary criticism wrapped inside personal memoir. So smart.
In the little bit I read about Michaels I didn't read any comparisons with Bellow but man I was thinking Bellow every step of the way with that super intelligent/academic introspection especially about Jewish identity. I also found myself thinking of Updike's Bech books.
In the little bit I read about Michaels I didn't read any comparisons with Bellow but man I was thinking Bellow every step of the way with that super intelligent/academic introspection especially about Jewish identity. I also found myself thinking of Updike's Bech books.
January 18, 2008
From Wikipedia:"His son Jesse Michaels was vocalist in the seminal underground punk rock band Operation Ivy, a precursor to Rancid." Little to do with Michaels other than getting me thinking how everything just adds up unknowingly provoking something else. How we all affect change even if it isn't evident in our ends. And it's admirable how maybe he didn't find total success, but existed so well at what he did that years later his works are being reissued and he can influence others with that exactitude.
I really enjoyed discovering Michaels with this collection. Apparently FSG is reissuing all his books soon. The collection begins and finishes nicely by beginning in his early years, quicker and edgier, and ending so confidently and with longer stories. Maybe there isn't any other way to collect these things together.
His stories are sensual, anxious and although not so domestic, somewhat reminiscent of Carver. They are sensory and full of masculine anxiety. His earlier stories seem a bit detached and surreal. But then they pick up with all the stories in "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could". Or "Journal" which is various lengthed segments that weave in and out of a recognizable narrative thread. Seeming somewhat like a journal, then a fiction, then characters return in new stories and so on.
I really enjoyed discovering Michaels with this collection. Apparently FSG is reissuing all his books soon. The collection begins and finishes nicely by beginning in his early years, quicker and edgier, and ending so confidently and with longer stories. Maybe there isn't any other way to collect these things together.
His stories are sensual, anxious and although not so domestic, somewhat reminiscent of Carver. They are sensory and full of masculine anxiety. His earlier stories seem a bit detached and surreal. But then they pick up with all the stories in "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could". Or "Journal" which is various lengthed segments that weave in and out of a recognizable narrative thread. Seeming somewhat like a journal, then a fiction, then characters return in new stories and so on.
March 10, 2010
"Larry said, "Tails." I heard a sort of keening in his voice, high and miserable. It came from neither fear nor defiance, but like the wind of Golgotha, from desolation. In that instant, I knew the difference between winners and losers has no relation to talent or beauty or personal will, what athletes call "desire," but only to a will beyond ourselves. Larry had just established his connection to it. If I weren't exceedingly frugal, I'd have bet every cent I made that summer on him." (244)
"I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, "Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you." I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps." (109)
"I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, "Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you." I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps." (109)
July 3, 2013
I feel like giving an eHarmony-style testimony about how I got to get smitten with this book. This was a straight up Goodreads recommendation. I don't remember why I went with it. Maybe I'd seen Leonard Michaels name often enough when it was previously recommended, back when I was being pitched the short stories released in their own little books, but their descriptions never popped out at me unlike this one's for some reason. Anyway, this book made me laugh out loud a lot, and it's rare enough to laugh out loud a little. He's jumped right to the top of my favorite authors of all time list, which is regularly updated and available for public viewing in my head.
August 13, 2007
Brief explorations of human interaction, usually with a sexual charge, always with deep, carefully rendered feeling, be that feeling callousness, desolation, or awe. I especially loved the mathematician title character of the Nachman stories. I will definitely be seeking out more of Michaels's work.
December 29, 2024
I have only read one story from this collection, "Murderers," and based on how well-loved this collection is, this review is a placeholder more than anything else, a reminder to myself to read this collection at some point. The two stars I gave this collection only apply to "Murderers," and I plan on eventually reading the collection, and then reviewing it in its entirety.
I read "Murderers" a few weeks ago, for my 12th-grade English class on short fiction. Compared to the various incredible, complex, and profound stories I had read for this class, I thought "Murderers" was quite bad. To me, it seemed needlessly grotesque. I also thought the writing was pretentious, too abstract, boring, and somewhat hard to follow. The plot bored me as well.
I think it's important to note that the teacher of this class who assigned this story, who has read and written and thought much more than I have, absolutely loves this story. My dislike of this story may very well be a result of not having enough perspective/experience.
One thing I enjoyed was the fact that the death of Arnold completely slipped past me (as well as many of my peers), because it was treated in such a matter-of-fact way. I didn't realize Arnold had died until a class discussion on the story, and I love when important details are treated in such a casual way.
Overall, though, I really didn't like this story. At first, I hated it, but the class discussion swayed me more toward simply disliking it.
I read "Murderers" a few weeks ago, for my 12th-grade English class on short fiction. Compared to the various incredible, complex, and profound stories I had read for this class, I thought "Murderers" was quite bad. To me, it seemed needlessly grotesque. I also thought the writing was pretentious, too abstract, boring, and somewhat hard to follow. The plot bored me as well.
I think it's important to note that the teacher of this class who assigned this story, who has read and written and thought much more than I have, absolutely loves this story. My dislike of this story may very well be a result of not having enough perspective/experience.
One thing I enjoyed was the fact that the death of Arnold completely slipped past me (as well as many of my peers), because it was treated in such a matter-of-fact way. I didn't realize Arnold had died until a class discussion on the story, and I love when important details are treated in such a casual way.
Overall, though, I really didn't like this story. At first, I hated it, but the class discussion swayed me more toward simply disliking it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2022
"His brows showed the puffed ridges of a pug's discolored, brutalized flesh where a billion capillaries had been mashed and meat-hammered to the consistency of stone."
There are those of us who read a sentence like that and require five minutes to pick our jaws up from the floor. Leonard Michaels is what I'd call a writer's writer's writer's writer. Those who value sentence masters will understand what a genius Michaels was and see how he was able to convey emotional intimacy through meter. The earlier stories are better and take more stylistic chances and reveal dark themes within 1970s New York City. One harrowing story involving a woman encountering several men outside an apartment building got under my skin in the best way. The Nachman Stories -- which is almost Michaels doing a riff on John Updike's Bech books -- are also quite enjoyable and show the many modes that Michaels could work in. This is a must-read book for anybody who cares about heartfelt real writing. Which appears to be a graying and increasingly dying population these days.
There are those of us who read a sentence like that and require five minutes to pick our jaws up from the floor. Leonard Michaels is what I'd call a writer's writer's writer's writer. Those who value sentence masters will understand what a genius Michaels was and see how he was able to convey emotional intimacy through meter. The earlier stories are better and take more stylistic chances and reveal dark themes within 1970s New York City. One harrowing story involving a woman encountering several men outside an apartment building got under my skin in the best way. The Nachman Stories -- which is almost Michaels doing a riff on John Updike's Bech books -- are also quite enjoyable and show the many modes that Michaels could work in. This is a must-read book for anybody who cares about heartfelt real writing. Which appears to be a graying and increasingly dying population these days.
August 24, 2025
couldn't decide whether to give this 2 or 5 stars for a month ....one's always on and on abt the adoption of lexical tyranny and good fucking dialogue then you see all these batshit, actually physically erotogenic and then comedically idiotic sentences and phrases and you have suddenly not to pick a roadside and conclude instead on your feelings about the morality of God because here he could be. I did prefer the stories from the earlier collections, theNachman stories were more subdued and open although i enjoyed the directions of the stories, would get irritated at some of the baseborn meandering. It will take me a year or five to decide my bests and a subsequent 10 to decide if i even liked them.
October 25, 2018
I came to this book because I had heard a wonderful reading of the short story Cryptology on the podcast Selected Shorts. I knew nothing about Leonard Michaels before hearing that podcast. This book is organized chronologically and Cryptology is the last of the Nachman Stories which are his final collection of stories. I read the book from cover to cover which I do not recommend. I would recommend starting with the short story Murderers, then the stories from To Feel These Things, then the Nachman Stories, and then go back and read the other stories. I found it a little difficult to read some of his earlier works without having much of a sense of him as a writer.
January 7, 2018
What an incredible collection. This body of work itself is off-the-charts fantastic, but just as valuable is the evolution displayed over the decades. How Michaels grew from Going Places to the Nachman stories shows what a true artist he was. I read this book slowly over the course of about three years, and expect I will revisit this book many times.
March 19, 2018
It was an interesting experience reading this collection. I was familiar with one of Michaels' short stories, which turned out to be his last. His early work left me cold, the mid-career stuff was good, but the last seven stories (collectively referred to as the Nachman stories), are breathtaking. I'm not sure that I can recommend the entire volume, but the Nachman stories are a must read.
September 4, 2024
Love this guy.A writers' writer indeed. This collection moves through some of his unhinged stories, then a group of marvelous character studies to the great, sweet, empathetic last writings. Read him for his sentences, his wit and clarity.
September 15, 2021
twas recommended by a friend, fellow writer. problematic, not really my thing. a valuable exercise...
February 7, 2025
Read Nachman stories. They are brilliant and witty. The amazing part is that everyone can find Nachman in themselves.
July 25, 2019
Inspired by spending too much time with this book.
December 1, 2008
I became an admirer of Leonard Michael's fiction when I read The Men's Club twenty years ago. The Men's Club is a short, mordant novel about seven men who gather in the Berkeley hills to discuss life, hardly a topic I can imagine tackling with any six of my male friends (for me it's a one-on-one subject; even if there were only three of us, one would be left out.) In the end, they talk more about the women in their lives than anything else, revealing the pains and resentments and confusions men harbor toward half of humanity while clarifying little and drinking too much. Sound boring? Well, it's only 132 pages, and Michaels wrote with great economy and deadpan vivacity, capturing a character's saga in very few words.
As the years went by, I dipped into Michael's short stories with interest but not much enthusiasm until he began publishing what are known as the Nachman stories. Nachman is an academic, a mathematician, who lives in L.A., has very little social life, and yet somehow is drawn into complex ethical and moral situations that defy resolution by his rational, analytic skills. In a sense he's a classic straight man, a sort of second banana, a recipient of referred pain and slapstick knocks on the head from history, culture, and his best friend's wife. The fundamental joke is that everything makes sense when Nachman sits alone working on math problems--and nothing makes sense when anyone intrudes on him.
Michaels was often praised for his short fiction, particularly his devastatingly concise style, but the Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels really reads like a prelude to the Nachman stories, seven in total, that appear at the end. They are the summa, his major accomplishment, perhaps because in Nachman he developed a character who is not transient, who absorbs punishment without being extinguished by the pain, comic or otherwise.
I wouldn't recommend skipping his earlier stories to get to Nachman, but I'd suggest dipping into them selectively and then leaping ahead to the end. It would be a pity to grow tired of Michaels' droll, comic send-ups before settling in with Nachman and reading Michaels at his best.
As the years went by, I dipped into Michael's short stories with interest but not much enthusiasm until he began publishing what are known as the Nachman stories. Nachman is an academic, a mathematician, who lives in L.A., has very little social life, and yet somehow is drawn into complex ethical and moral situations that defy resolution by his rational, analytic skills. In a sense he's a classic straight man, a sort of second banana, a recipient of referred pain and slapstick knocks on the head from history, culture, and his best friend's wife. The fundamental joke is that everything makes sense when Nachman sits alone working on math problems--and nothing makes sense when anyone intrudes on him.
Michaels was often praised for his short fiction, particularly his devastatingly concise style, but the Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels really reads like a prelude to the Nachman stories, seven in total, that appear at the end. They are the summa, his major accomplishment, perhaps because in Nachman he developed a character who is not transient, who absorbs punishment without being extinguished by the pain, comic or otherwise.
I wouldn't recommend skipping his earlier stories to get to Nachman, but I'd suggest dipping into them selectively and then leaping ahead to the end. It would be a pity to grow tired of Michaels' droll, comic send-ups before settling in with Nachman and reading Michaels at his best.
April 26, 2014
This edition is provides a marvelous vantage point from which the creative trajectory of LM becomes clear. Starting from flashy, acrid stories of the 60s and 70s, in which Babel and the Russian Formalists go fucking around in Manhattan, running across a period of what seems to be intellectually induced disorientation, where the author seems to give a slap to every authoritative philosophizer he meets saying "come again?", bullying the reader into consuming diaries as a form of fiction and enjoying ideas like blow-jobs, the volume flows into the gentle, wistful precision of the Nachman stories.
Up until Nachman, I kept laughing aloud so hard I couldn't read, and I kept chewing on every clause, reluctant to swallow, choking on the juice; Nachman seems like a gentle, merciless surgery. Something steely and relentless comes up in that look on the cover towards the end, watches you back and is gone.
There are things I will never be able to understand, things of tremendous and inconceivable power, unreachable for the reason and in immediate contact with my life, Michaels told me somewhere along the way.
Up until Nachman, I kept laughing aloud so hard I couldn't read, and I kept chewing on every clause, reluctant to swallow, choking on the juice; Nachman seems like a gentle, merciless surgery. Something steely and relentless comes up in that look on the cover towards the end, watches you back and is gone.
There are things I will never be able to understand, things of tremendous and inconceivable power, unreachable for the reason and in immediate contact with my life, Michaels told me somewhere along the way.
August 22, 2014
Like the Men's Club, most of these stories are nearly perfect, marred only by some bitter misogyny, some tone-deaf characterizations (mostly of women) and some scattershot language experiments that occlude more than elucidate.
But on the upside, there are some truly bizarre images and phrasings in these stories. The stories are often very funny and tragic, as most things in life are. He's doing something very different from Roth but if you've got a hunger for weirdo, horny New York jews from a vanished social stratum -- a very specific hunger, like literary pica, perhaps -- Leonard Michaels is your guy.
Sylvia is probably the best book he wrote* but these are short, intense stories, many of which reward extra readings. It's not that there are new layers to discover. It's more like riding a roller coaster a second time in that the track is fixed and broadcast clearly but that doesn't mean mussing your hair and nearly hworking up that fried dough aren't worth the thrills.
*I haven't read his essays collection.
But on the upside, there are some truly bizarre images and phrasings in these stories. The stories are often very funny and tragic, as most things in life are. He's doing something very different from Roth but if you've got a hunger for weirdo, horny New York jews from a vanished social stratum -- a very specific hunger, like literary pica, perhaps -- Leonard Michaels is your guy.
Sylvia is probably the best book he wrote* but these are short, intense stories, many of which reward extra readings. It's not that there are new layers to discover. It's more like riding a roller coaster a second time in that the track is fixed and broadcast clearly but that doesn't mean mussing your hair and nearly hworking up that fried dough aren't worth the thrills.
*I haven't read his essays collection.
January 20, 2008
Being a collection of short stories that covers a wide period of time (from the first collection of stories: Going Places (1969) through: A Girl with a Monkey (2000) and the Nachman stories), it is wonderful to progress through the variety of highly distinctive and unique stories that Leonard Michaels built. Although I find some similarity with Donald Barthelme's writing, these stories are unique in their language and style.
Human beings being animals of orders and classifications, I would say that the stories are "psychologically surreal" in their presentation--that is, they are concerned not with describing the visual/photographic reality of a moment or event nor in creating a standard time-bound plot--but with the emotional content and meaning that character's ascribe to events.
This is definitely a collection of stories worth delving into if you have a fascination for language and how a story can be told and created.
Human beings being animals of orders and classifications, I would say that the stories are "psychologically surreal" in their presentation--that is, they are concerned not with describing the visual/photographic reality of a moment or event nor in creating a standard time-bound plot--but with the emotional content and meaning that character's ascribe to events.
This is definitely a collection of stories worth delving into if you have a fascination for language and how a story can be told and created.
December 30, 2007
I have read most of the stories in this book in their original, now out-of-print collections (I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM IF I COULD, GOING PLACES and SHUFFLE) or in Harper's magazine and other literary journals. A cool, funky high school teacher of mine suggested I read I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM twenty years ago, and I have been seeking out Michaels' writing ever since. He's a great unsung hero of mine. For a few years I subscribed to THE THREEPENNY REVIEW mainly because he so often wrote short pieces for them. I always meant to write to him and tell him how much his writing meant to me. I think it was his stories that shaped the way I saw adult life in New York city years before I actually lived there.
February 16, 2010
Five stars for the Nachman stories. Nachman is a mathematician at UCLA. He is well known among mathematicians, and more or less content. He lives alone, but appreciates people. These stories are about how he maintains friendships and loves women, with little physical contact, but harrowing internal struggles of the mind. There are seven Nachman stories, and Michaels died while completing a book of Nachman stories. I suspect anyone who reads these will grow fond of Nachman, the sensitive genius.
The earlier stories of Michaels were written in the sixties and seventies. They are adventurous, raunchy, and funny. Some are so fast-paced that I could not keep up with them. They are sort of like Philip Roth mixed with Donald Barthelme.
The earlier stories of Michaels were written in the sixties and seventies. They are adventurous, raunchy, and funny. Some are so fast-paced that I could not keep up with them. They are sort of like Philip Roth mixed with Donald Barthelme.
January 17, 2013
I first became aware of Leonard Michaels when I heard one of the Nachman stories read on The New Yorker Fiction podcast. (An excellent podcast, by the way, for anyone who loves literature.) I don't know that I can put my finger on what it was that so completely sucked me in, but I had to get the book so I could read about Nachman's other adventures. I was not disappointed; the rest of the stories were just as engrossing as the first.
I have to admit that I have yet to read the rest of the book but this one warrants 5 stars for the Nachman stories alone.
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which says so much in only 5 words: "Their conjugal solidarity was daunting."
I have to admit that I have yet to read the rest of the book but this one warrants 5 stars for the Nachman stories alone.
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which says so much in only 5 words: "Their conjugal solidarity was daunting."
August 2, 2014
Having heard one Michaels' "Nachman stories" read recently on the New Yorker fiction podcast, I recalled how much I enjoyed reading several of Michaels' stories and essays years ago. I purchased the Kindle edition and read or re-read all the Nachman stories: several stories that he wrote about the same character, the socially maladroit mathematician but captivating character Nachman. I recommend them highly.
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