The Essays of Leonard Michaels Author:Leonard Michaels Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and ?60sand of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the ?70s and ?80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The sa... more »me honesty and excitement shine in Michaels?s highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he?s asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word relationship,? or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page.The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters. Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) was the author of five collections of stories and essaysGoing Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Shuffle, A Girl with a Monkey, and To Feel These Thingsas well as two novels, Sylvia and The Men?s Club. Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and ?60sand of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the ?70s and ?80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels?s highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he?s asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word relationship,? or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page.
The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters. "[The Essays of Leonard Michaels] showcases Michaels's timing, wit and instinctively good prose. Whatever the subject matterand the essays here range from Edward Hopper to the Rita Hayworth vehicle 'Gilda' to Yiddish, his first languageMichaels channels the full force of his intellectual and narrative abilities into a voice that is at once sensitive and unyielding . . . His sarcasm and darkness are deployed in moderation, and this collectionedited by his widow, Katherine Ogden Michaelssteams forward largely on his urgent desire to understand what he can of the world."Megan Busky, The New York Times Book Review "[The Essays of Leonard Michaels] showcases Michaels's timing, wit and instinctively good prose. Whatever the subject matterand the essays here range from Edward Hopper to the Rita Hayworth vehicle 'Gilda' to Yiddish, his first languageMichaels channels the full force of his intellectual and narrative abilities into a voice that is at once sensitive and unyielding . . . His sarcasm and darkness are deployed in moderation, and this collectionedited by his widow, Katherine Ogden Michaelssteams forward largely on his urgent desire to understand what he can of the world."Megan Busky, The New York Times Book Review
"As fine and original a prose stylist as this country was lucky enough to have."Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
"A collection of brilliant, funny, uncategorizable pieces published for the first time under one cover . . . The collection is divided into `critical? and `autobiographical? essays, but the distinction is almost arbitrary . . . Throwing memoiristic associations into piecesan aside on beautiful women in one about Saul Bellow, for exampleMichaels creates intimacy with the reader; it's as if we're looking over his shoulder as he struggles with issues of craft and form. In fact, reading this collection feels less like an encounter with a book whose positions have been carved and sanded than a conversation with a guy in a cafeteria, his hands waving to catch an image, pieces of Danish flying from his fast mouth . . . In 'My Yiddish,' the last piece [Michaels] completed before dying of complications from lymphoma in 2003, his ideas about Jews, language and meaning mount to a stunning crescendo."Laurie Stone, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A great pleasure . . . These [are] wonderful, surprising essays . . . Sharp, funny, opinionated, observant, concise."Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe
"The new book that dazzled me the most this past year, and that I loved the most, was The Essays of Leonard Michaels . . . [It has] some of the greatest essays I know; they will break your heart and excite your thinking at the same time."Phillip Lopate, TheMillions.com
"Emotionally responsive and intensely intellectual . . . [Michaels's essays] are jewels of experimentation in understanding and feeling."Gerald Sorin, Haaretz
"Leonard Michaels, the novelist and short-story writer who died in 2003, never quite achieved the same degree of fame as other American Jewish writers of his generation . . . Since Michaels's death, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has done his work justice, reissuing his Collected Stories and his novels, The Men's Club and Sylvia. Now comes a new edition to his catalogue, The Essays of Leonard Michaels, a fairly brief collection of critical and autobiographical pieces . . . 'Their subjects vary widely,' the book's editor, Michaels's widow Katherine Ogden Michaels, writes in her introduction, 'encompassing literature, philosophy, and the visual and musical arts, but nearly all of them contain a powerful concern with sense experience itselfparticularly with listening and hearing, looking and seeing.' This is true, as far as it goes, but it doesn't fully capture the real interest and strangeness of Michaels's writing . . . In literature, as in film, our desire to see and know is at odds with our need for privacy and the sacred . . . Michaels cannot help embracing that desire, or succumbing to it. Yet his constant sense that there is a sin involved in the exposure of self and others is what gives his essays, like his stories, their bitter strength and their distinctively Jewish character."Adam Kirsch, Tablet magazine"
A collection of articles by celebrated author Michaels. Divided into two distinct halves, the volume serves as an assemblage of the author's nonfiction work, much of which was published late in his life . . . The best essay is 'The Zipper,' which centers on Rita Hayworth's role in Gilda and the emotional reaction it caused in the teenaged Michaels. The story successfully synergizes the book's two halves, ably combining the critical eye of the first section with the self-reflection of the second."Kirkus Reviews
"In this definitive collection of short nonfiction essays by Michaels, we find two smaller collections of essayscritical and biographical. Michaels analyzes story parts and the origins of the word relationship and its deeper meaning in literature; he pays tribute to an anonymous author, all the while philosophizing and quoting Sartre, Genet, Plato, Joyce, Montaigne, and the Bible. The author writes of being the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, learning English from a neighbor, and growing up in New York City, and he describes his time spent in Michigan, California, and France, among other places . . . Michaels explains that we write about ourselves to learn about ourselves, and he acknowledges that trying to write nonfiction is an act of insanity."David L. Reynolds, Library Journal
"These essays, spare and elegant as Michaels alights on a range of subjects, follow the late writer's own precept: 'I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and thus tend always to write about ourselves.' This pungent collection, by a quizzical New York Jew who never quite assimilated, divides into two sections: critical essays and autobiographical essays. Many of these works first appeared in the Threepenny Review, among other publications. The first part includes a brilliant essay 'On Love' and another on 'Having Trouble with My Relationship.' The latter breezily covers figures as diverse as Pope, Larkin, Heidegger and Kafka. Other figures and subjects blowing through these pages include Bellow, Nabokov, Kubrick, Edward Hopper, Wallace Stevens Rita Hayworth, and how to watch a movie. The best and most penetrating essays come in the second section, as Michaels gives a wincing account of family bedtime storieson pogromsa happier set of epiphanies on his father, a wise Yiddish-speaking barber; and yet another describing fish-out-of-water experiences at Berkeley. All told, these are soul-baring occasional pieces by a writer's writer and a master stylist."Publishers Weekly