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 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' stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth." — Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
Author
Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.
