Download or read book The Essays of Leonard Michaels written by Leonard Michaels and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NONFICTION FROM "ONE OF THE STRONGEST AND MOST ARRESTING PROSE TALENTS OF HIS GENERATION" (LARRY MCMURTRY) Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and '60s—and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the '70s and '80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels's highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he's asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word "relationship," or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page. The Essays of Leonard Michaels is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters.
Download or read book The Men s Club written by Leonard Michaels and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1981, Leonard Michaels's The Men's Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" (The New York Times Book Review). Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk.
Download or read book The Collected Stories written by Leonard Michaels and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonard Michaels was a master of the short story. His collections are among the most admired, influential, and exciting of the last half century. The Collected Stories brings them back into print, from the astonishing debut Going Places (1969) to the uncollected last stories, unavailable since they appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, and Partisan Review. At every stage in his career, Michaels produced taut, spare tales of sex, love, and other adult intimacies: gossip, argument, friendship, guilt, rage. A fearless writer—"destructive, joyful, brilliant, purely creative," in the words of John Hawkes—Michaels probed his characters' motivations with brutal humor and startling frankness; his ear for the vernacular puts him in the company of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud. Remarkable for its compression and cadences, his prose is nothing short of addictive. The Collected Stories is a landmark. "Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries -- Grace Paley and Philip Roth." -- Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book A Cat written by Leonard Michaels and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the mystery of the cat can never ultimately be defined, Michaels comes as close as possible to revealing its essence. A cat is content to be a cat. A cat is not owned by anybody. A cat imagines things about you, nothing you can know for sure. A cat reminds us that much in this world remains unknown. In his novels, stories, and essays, Leonard Michaels proved himself to be one of the most incisive observers of human behavior, but few know that he was every bit as perspicacious a chronicler of America’s favorite pet: the domestic cat. Elusive, elegant, and often humorous—much like his subject—Michaels gives us this unfathomable animal as we have never quite seen it before, and yet as we have always known it to be. Through a series of meditations, aphorisms, and anecdotes, along with original illustrations from Frances Lerner, A Cat is a both a compendium of feline behavior and a love letter to this marvelous creature.
Download or read book I Would Have Saved Them If I Could written by Leonard Michaels and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 1982 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen stories focus on both unexpected and carefully planned visions and versions of sexual experience and erotic thought in the uncertain, often impersonal contemporary city
Download or read book The Nachman Stories written by Leonard Michaels and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of linked stories that follow Raphael Nachman a simple, aging mathematician whose sensual needs are satisfied by working out maths problems and playing the violin throughout his later years.
Download or read book Sylvia written by Leonard Michaels and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Cutty One Rock written by August Kleinzahler and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2005-12-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place. These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.
Download or read book A Girl with a Monkey written by Leonard Michaels and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction.A Lost Angeles Times Best Fiction Title of 2000. Finalist, 2000 Bay Area Book Reviewers Fiction Award. Brilliant... Anyone concerned with the American short story should read and know these stories.... Other American writers have tried to write stories like these, but Leonard Michaels got there first and has done it better than almost anyone else.--Charles Baxter, San Francisco Chronicle Michaels, one of the most highly regarded contemporary American literary figures and widely read by the discerning public, has long been regarded as a master of the short story. His stature can only be enhanced by this gathering of the best of his previous work as well as new stories, all of them written within the period of the early 1960s through the 1990s. Love and sexuality are the twin themes he continues to mine, and the specific situations he creates to explore these themes pinpoint in the sheerest of prose the absolute truth about relationships. Michaels's trenchant, direct, and lyrical style, with not one word wasted, works as a tight springboard for conveying his vast knowledge about why we love who we love. No library's short story collection is complete without this career-defining compilation.--Brad Hooper, Booklist
Download or read book West of the West written by Leonard Michaels and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-05-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid collection of stories, essays, remembrances and poems, conceived and organized as a journey through California, by a diverse and splendid array of writers including Jack Kerouac, Amy Tan, M.F.K. Fisher, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal.
Download or read book The Glorious American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay.
Download or read book Hiding in Plain Sight written by Wendy Lesser and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reality Hunger written by David Shields and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
Download or read book The Bed Moved written by Rebecca Schiff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The audacious, savagely funny debut of a writer of razor-sharp wit and surprising tenderness: a collection of stories that gives us a fresh take on adolescence, death, sex; on being Jewish-ish; and on finding one’s way as a young woman in the world. A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a “clothing optional resort” in California. A nerdy high-schooler has her first sexual experience at Geology Camp. A college student, on the night of her father’s funeral, watches a video of her bat mitzvah, hypnotized by the image of the girl she used to be . . . Frank and irreverent, Rebecca Schiff’s stories offer a singular view of growing up (or not) and finding love (or not) in today’s ever-uncertain landscape. In its bone-dry humor, its pithy observations, and its thrilling ability to unmask the most revealing moments of human interaction—no matter how fleeting—The Bed Moved announces a new talent to be reckoned with.
Download or read book The Other Persuasion written by Seymour Kleinberg and published by Vintage Books USA. This book was released on 1977 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The State of the Language written by Leonard Michaels and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers a wide range of topics related to contemporary language
Download or read book The State of the Language written by Christopher Ricks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sprawling, uncoordinated, uneven, noisy, and appealing," wrote one reviewer of the first edition of this book, published on 1 January 1980. "The language is in rude health," wrote another. Exactly a decade later, here is the book anew, with the same editors but with fifty fresh contributors writing essays and poems that engage our language today. Imaginative attention is bestowed on the changes of recent years, changes not only in the language but in how language is understood. In the forefront are the relations between British English, American English, and those other Englishes with which they compete or cooperate. The nervous negotiations of gender and feminism. The darkness of AIDS. The bright flicker of the computer. The old smolderings of "standard English" and correctness. The "bad language" that has lately done so well in our society. How all this has been politicized—or is it rather that its inevitably political nature has only now been recognized? Here these and many other facets of the language catch the various light. What has changed is understood in relation to what has not changed, and what has been gained in relation to what has been lost. There is sweep as well as detail, telescope as well as microscope, in this contemplation of the world of our language as it enters the world of the 1990s. The State of the Language has been prepared in cooperation with the English-Speaking Union of San Francisco. Some titles of essays in the book: Whose English? by Sidney Greenbaum Look, Ma, I'm Talking by Sandra Gilbert Fighting Talk by Marina Warner No Opera Please—We're British by Michael Bawtree Changing What We Sing by Margaret Doody On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today by David Dabydeen Talking Black by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Subway Graffiti by Walter J. Ong Doublespeak by William Lutz It's a Myth, Innit? Politeness and the English Tag Question by John Algeo This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
