The Men's Club

“Short, funny, and discomforting . . . Love stories based on lost connections, incompatible longings, and lacerating fights . . . Anger rather than tenderness seems to be the chief means of communication between the sexes . . . The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Chekhov and Kafka, after consulting Chaucer, might have collaborated on The Men's Club. It is excellent.”—John Leonard, The New York Times

“Slapstick, even the neurotic slapstick of [Philip] Roth, is too tame for Michaels’s dark vision. In his fiction, bodies are not just teased by sex; they are mocked and distorted, as savagely as in a Bosch triptych . . . The more outlandishly transgressive Michaels’s writing becomes, the more intensely the reader senses his nostalgia for the humane . . . [Michaels] makes genuine drama out of the life of the mind [and] fireworks out of the ordeal of the body.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

“Brilliant and resonant . . . A story that every man could tell if he dared to, but only a writer as gifted as Leonard Michaels could shape.”—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

“[Michaels] wrote with humor and a Yiddish verve that could only be so riotously blasphemous because it’s tethered to the sacred culture of the Old Country. Leonard Michaels should never be put on the same pedestal as Philip Roth and Grace Paley. He was unique; he deserves his own.”—Daniel Septimus, The Jerusalem Post

“Michaels, it seems, never wrote a boring sentence.”—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

“The best writer I ever encountered . . . The writer who influences me more than any other.”—David Bezmozgis, Nextbook

“Wondrous, mad, instructive and disabusing, [Michaels’s work] should be widely read.”—Joshua Cohen, Forward

“Michaels is as good as any writer you're likely to run across.”—Alex Abramovich, Bookforum