Hello. This is Greg Rock. Third and last to arrive in the string of guest bloggers for the John Fox. I am a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Los Angeles.
The last book I bought was The Collected Stories: by Leonard Michaels.
Discovering Leonard Michaels, after he was first recommended by a writing professor, was sort of a revelation. To generalize or compare the man to other post-war Jewish authors is wrong but inevitable. Unfortunately, compared to contemporaries like Philip Roth, most people don’t know him or his work. I will say that like Bernard Malamud, an obvious influence, Michaels wrote mainly short stories and became an acknowledged master of the form. Born in 1933, he was a first-generation Americans born to Immigrant parents, grew up on the Lower East Side, and spoke Yiddish until he entered elementary school.
Fortunately this recently released collection is the first to gather Leonard Michael’s two major short story collections “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would online drugstore cheap Have Saved Them If I Could” (1975) in one place. Both of these collection earned Michaels high praise from fellow writers (Susan Sontag, Charles Baxter, Larry McMurty) who considered him one of the best prose stylists of his generation. And in my opinion they aren’t wrong. Michaels writes great sentences that function, as great literary art should, like a pistol whip to the face.
A young man, kicked out of his girlfriend’s parents house, wandering naked through New York City street
(City Boy.)
“I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and suddenly I knew why. I didn’t love her. Slender legs. I didn’t.”
Or a middle-aged man getting anonymously jerked off on the subway (Getting Lucky.)
“Fingers squeezed goodbye, replaced him, zipped up, slipped away.”
Or contemplating escape from one’s conservative and fearful family (Murderers.)
“I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t?”
Hard to think of anyone else constructing such incredible prose from such strange moments.
