Bøger af Leonard Michaels

While the mystery of the cat can never ultimately be defined, Michaels comes as close as possible to revealing its essence.

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.

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.

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.

An outrageous, darkly funny novel aboutmanhood . . . The late 1970s. Seven men - friends, acquaintances, and strangers - gather in a suburban home in Berkeley, California. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them. But as the evening wears on and the drinks flow faster, they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk - to unburden and to share, to try and comprehend their feelings, their insecurities, their lives. Kramer claims he's slept with six hundred women; Berliner and his wife beat each other up as foreplay; Cavanaugh - big handsome guy - is haunted by his former life as a professional basketball player. And Terry just can't get over Deborah Zeller. The Men's Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood and masculinity.

Leonard, a young writer drifting through the city, meets Sylvia by chance at a friend's shabby Greenwich Village apartment. He's instantly besotted with her striking beauty and quiet disdain, and the question of what to do with his life is resolved. In this remarkable semi-autobiographical novel, we are drawn into the world of a beatnik couple living in Manhattan in the early 1960s, and their demi-monde of jazz, poetry, late nights and early mornings. But when Sylvia's depression emerges and her disturbances take hold, their fights become increasingly violent and their relationship hurtles towards self-destruction. Written with extraordinary clarity and precision, this is a compelling portrait of the mad intensity, exquisite pain and destructive power of young love. 'Every page reveals the mark of an extraordinarily original and gifted talent.' - William Styron 'The writing isn't merely stylish; it's vital . . . the ending is as shocking as that of any thriller.' - Sarah Manguso 'A novel that has the power and the rawness of memoir.' - New York Times

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 to 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. Michael''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.