The Essays of Leonard Michaels

“Leonard Michaels writes in perfectly shaped sentences...you’ll look for a long time to find writing as good as this and thinking as clear.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"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 pieces—an aside on beautiful women in one about Saul Bellow, for example—Michaels 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

"Divided into autobiographical and critical essays, this collection offers fans of Michaels's fiction deeper insight into his personal background and literary tastes. 'My Yiddish' documents the effects that Yiddish had on his conversational sentence structure, while 'On Love' examines the appearance of the 'pornographic void' in Henry James, Joyce, and Nabokov. All relatively short, the essays possess a clipped intensity traceable to Michaels's adoration for Isaac Babel."—Jed Lipinski, The Village Voice

"For people who have discovered—or rediscovered—Michaels in recent years, the publication of The Essays of Leonard Michaels will seem like a natural extension of what they’ve already come to expect from his fiction. For people still unfamiliar with Michaels, the essays will serve as a perfectly fitting introduction to the work of one the best writers of the post-WWII era. The essays are divided into two sections, 'Critical Essays' and 'Autobiographical Essays,' and though the division isn’t arbitrary, the essays have more in common with each other—and with Michaels’s stories—than they don’t. Their chief similarity is the quality of Michaels’s prose, identifiable in any form, but also the fact that they all address something deeply personal . . . Because I have been an avid reader of Michaels for more than a decade, I have previously read nearly all of the essays in the collection. Several are among my favourite pieces of writing in any form. Michaels’s essay about his father, modestly titled 'My Father,' is simply one of the best things I have ever read. His essay 'My Yiddish,' recounting his history with Yiddish, manages to capture the sharp humour and melancholy of this fading language and culture. 'Kishkas,' about the adaptation of his novel The Men’s Club into a Hollywood film, is as wise and excruciating an account of a writer’s descent into the rabbit-hole of the movie business as I have ever read. I could go on and recommend many others, but what I say about them is not even satisfying by way of approximation. The essays must be read for themselves."—David Bezmozgis, The National Post

"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 essays—critical 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