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Sylvia

A Novel

Leonard Michaels; Introduction by Diane Johnson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374271070
ISBN13: 9780374271077

Trade Paperback

144 Pages

$15.00

CA$20.50

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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.

Reviews

Praise for Sylvia

"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

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an 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,...