The Collected Stories

"[Michaels's] every page reveals the mark of an extraordinarily original and gifted talent."—William Styron

"Anyone concerned with the American short story should read and know these stories."—Charles Baxter, San Francisco Chronicle

"To read through The Collected Stories, a new omnibus volume, is to see that the author's five decades of short fiction argue effortlessly for a place beside the work of America's paragons of the story form."—Wyatt Mason, Harper's Magazine

"What's still most hypnotizing about Michaels' work isn't just the circumstances of characters coming together or the shock of their collisions; it's also the thrumming violence that occupies a space so close to love . . . These stories feel fresh because of Michaels' ability to dig deep into the sticky morass of love and personal relationships—romantic, filial, platonic—and to highlight all the ways we connect or fail to. He evokes the territory of rivalry, jealously and guilt, their complex transactions. He fixes the most twisty, difficult-to-pinpoint miscommunication to the page . . . Taken as a whole, the stories give us humanity at the nadir—dissolute, self-involved, self-indulgent shadows . . . As a writer, he crafted beautiful, glinting stories, cataloging life: the hurts we dole out, the slights we inevitably receive."—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

"Larky, fifully brilliant, as profane as they are aphoristic, Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth. Like theirs, Michaels's vernacular achieves the level of song . . . ['Murderers'] measures up to that other masterpiece about a young boy on a rooftop, Philip Roth's 'Conversion of the Jews' . . . Michaels's later work contains his greatest writing . . . The seven astonishing Nachman stories . . . consider moral problems freshly. All the ornament seems burned off, purified; the narratives distilled and gorgeously plain, as only a great stylist's can become. Less crackling than the earlier work, they're smoother in the mouth, stark in form. Michaels was writing more Nachman stories when he died. If finished and published together, they might have made a novel. As it is, they're seven irregular beauties, to be read again and again."—Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review

"Leonard Michaels was one of the great American writers of the past half century. At the very least, he was a master of the short story in an era when the short story (Paley, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver) was where the major literary action was . . . A writer who can't be ignored."—Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News

"The Collected Stories . . . is frankly startling in its talent, energy, sensitivity, and savagery."—Frances Reade, SF Weekly

"In 1971, a friend pressed a short story on me—a manic first-person account of youthful copulation, parental discovery, cardiac arrest and renewed copulation—that was fiercer and faster than just about anything I had ever read. The story was Leonard Michaels' ‘City Boy,' and it delivered such a slap that it's come back to me every few weeks, sometimes every few days, since then. So have several other Michaels stories. The Collected Stories would make an admirable master class in the art of short fiction if its brilliance weren't likely to drive aspiring writers to despair. It's illuminating, too, for what it suggests about the shape of a literary life . . . Michaels' prose isn't nice. ‘She tried to move. I kissed her mouth, Her crinoline smashed like sugar. Pig that I was, I couldn't move. The clock ticked hysterically. Ticks piled up like insects. Muscles lapsed in her highs. Her fingers scratched on my neck as if looking for buttons.' That's close to perfection . . . It's dazzling . . . It's hardly unusual for a writer of fiction to find that by going outside himself he goes deeper inside. But it's gratifying to discover that when Michaels scraped away the crust of his youth cruelty he discovered reserves of generosity. At the beginning of his career he was smart. At the end he was wise. It would take a Leonard Michaels to say that without sounding corny."—Craig Seligman, Newsday

"[Michaels's] prose novel moved at a fast clip and paid readers the compliment of assuming they could match his mental velocity, with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab . . . The publication of his collected short stories should win him many new fans, offering as it does ample proof that he was among the few essential American short story writers of the past half-century."—Philip Lopate, The Nation

"This new volume from his original publisher features both early books, a handful of stories from the 1990s, and, most interestingly, a previously uncollected seven-story cycle known as the ‘Nachman stories,' some of which were published in The New Yorker before Michaels' death in 2003. The appearance of those stories coincided with a resurgence of interest in his career, as younger writers like David Bezmozgis and Sam Lipsyte began to cite him as a major influence. It is easy to see why: Sentence for sentence, Michaels builds astonishing energy and rhythm, tense coils of words that frequently spring forth into violence, and then release just as quickly, almost randomly . . . Writing in a Jewish tradition that encompasses the Borscht Belt, Philip Roth, and even Woody Allen, Michaels infuses his situations with intelligent, sometimes generous humor; he wouldn't be entirely mischaracterized as a great comic writer."—Kevin Doughten, The Bloomsbury Review

"[Michaels] could sound absurdist like Donald Barthelme one day, and, the next, like a Beat poet . . . Whether he was writing a classic story or a memoirlike vignette, his style seemed free and easy."—Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly

"In this galvanizing book, the stories of Michael's debut, Going Places, as well as I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, are reprinted, one example of his talent after another. In ‘Manikin,' a college coed is raped by a Turkish exchange student and, as a result, abandoned by her Ivy League fiancé. In ‘The Deal,' a woman nervously negotiates with 20 raucous boys for her stolen glove. In ‘Murderers,' the extravagant sex play of a newly married rabbi and his young wife leads to the death of one of the local youths who routinely spy on them. Fiction from three other volumes—Shuffle, To Feel These Things and A Girl with a Monkey—is also offered. Sex and violence are salvation for some of the characters, as revenge is for others. Most of the protagonists, one generation past the Holocaust, live their lives in hot pursuit of something, anything. They just don't know what. Also here are the previously uncollected Nachman stories, which Michaels was preparing for a book when he died. Starring the redoubtable Nachman—a renowned mathematician who lives alone, continuously puzzled by human relationships, by almost everything, really, save the beauty and logic of numbers—these stories are written in a controlled, elegant style that transforms the rapacious search for meaning that marked the author's earlier work into a sublime meditation on love and life. With this volume, Michaels can take his place next to other exemplars of the American short story, Malamud, Paley, O'Connor and Cheever."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Though Michaels, who died in 2003 at the age of 70, is probably best known for his novel The Men's Club, these 38 stories attest to his skill as a short story writer. Readers coming to Michaels's work for the first time will find the early, pointed stories from his noteworthy collections, Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could as well as some of his later works that have never been collected. Michaels's early stories are written with a frantic sexuality that displays his distinctive dark humor. In 'Fingers and Toes,' recurring characters Henry and Phillip weigh the value of their friendship against their encounters with the same woman through a set of urban hallucinations characteristic of the early stories. Raphael Nachman, the icon of Michaels's later fiction, is an aging mathematician at UCLA and a surprising foil to Michaels's usual kinetic energy. In the first Nachman story, the professor takes a guest lectureship in his ancestral Poland and tries to reconcile his analytical yet peaceful view of the world with his family's history. Fans of the author should be thrilled at having such a wide body of work between two covers."—Publishers Weekly