Sylvia

First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.

Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.

Praise

“Sylvia is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels’s first wife Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide . . . At 129 pages, the reissue of Sylvia, though billed as a novel, has the power and the rawness of memoir.”—Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author(s)

Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men’s Club, among other books. FSG will publish his Collected Stories in June to coincide with the reissue of Sylvia.

Excerpt

In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berkeley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I’d do, only a desire to write stories. I’d also been to graduate school at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956. All in all, five years of classes in literature. I don’t know how else I might have spent those five years, but I didn’t want to hear more lectures, study for more exams, or see myself growing old in the library.

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