The Essays of Leonard Michaels [Paperback]

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 '60sand 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 Michaelsis 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.

The new book that dazzled me most this past year, and that I loved the most, wasThe Essays of Leonard Michaels.. . . [It has] some of the greatest essays I know; they will break your heart and excite your thinking at the same time. Michaels had a trenchant, elegantly forceful style that cut to the bone. Phillip Lopate, TheMillions.com

Leonard Michaels is much beloved by other writers--first and foremost for the angle and thrust of his sentences . . . [He] is as good as any writer you're likely to run across. Alex Abramovich, Bookforum

Brilliant, funny, uncategorizable . . . Rather than aiming for a place beyond language, [Michaels] scratches at experience that's below it: the shivers and shakes that make us embrace, murder and argue with our fellow lonely and desiring human beings. Laurie Stone, Los Angeles Times

Emotionally responsive and intensely intellectual . . . [Michaels's essays] are jewels of experimentation in ulÃ#